The election of the Democrat Doug Jones to a Senate seat in the Republican stronghold of Alabama has stimulated an appraisal of the black female voter’s political power. Ninety-eight per cent of black women (and ninety-six per cent of black voters over all) chose Jones over his rival, Roy Moore, who had been credibly accused of child molestation and sexual assault. Meanwhile, sixty-three per cent of white women supported Moore; among evangelical white women, the figure rose to seventy-six per cent. Suddenly, it seemed impossible to mention the status of the black American woman without invoking the notion that she is an omniscient moral creature. Black women saved us, the refrain goes.

The hosannas accumulated on social media and in the news, a multiplicity of brief ecstasies for the citizen who has been, as bell hooks wrote in “Ain’t I a Woman,” “socialized out of existence”: “It’s really nice of black people to save America—after slavery, Jim Crow, and everything else.” “What if we just let black women run everything” and, in response, “I’m definitely ready for that. I said a prayer the other day and when God answered me back she was a Black Woman.” “Black voters, in particular black women, save America again.” “Dear America, We will always save your ass, because at the end of the day, we live here and love this country, even if you don’t always love us back.” The proven adage is that black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party. That black women themselves trade in such phrases only stresses the obstinacy of the idea that “black women will save America from itself.”

This rapturous talk is, partially, an effect of the Trump era. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, in which fifty-three per cent of white women voted for Trump, the women’s movement has had to accept that the concept of innate female moral superiority is untenable. In a photo from the Women’s March, which provides a visual elaboration of this dissonance, a trio of blond women, each wearing a hot-pink “pussyhat,” giddily selfie and text, while, in the foreground, a black woman, later identified as Angela Peoples, casually holds a poster, on which she has written, “Don’t forget: White Women Voted for Trump.” “Stop Killing Black People” is printed on her baseball cap. The Capitol looms in the distance, and Peoples, as captured by her boyfriend, Kevin Banatte, seems to stand in accord with its permanence: she’s slack, pulling on a lollipop, possessing a confident serenity, as if she, too, might have been there for centuries.

The selective rhetorical elevation of black women acts as a sort of overcorrection. For better and for worse, the gospel of individualism remains the bedrock of American identity. And yet the creed does not apply to black women, who are regarded not as varied, self-interested political actors, or as people to be served or scrutinized in meaningful ways, if they are regarded at all. Instead, the black female voter is thought to make decisions, with infinite patience and piety, in response to the strident acts of self-determination around her. Hers is a reactionary, not a visionary, politics, a righting of the ship of state. (The veteran congresswoman Maxine Waters, in her charismatic crusade against Trump, has made clever use of this presumption, subversively embracing the colloquial title of Auntie.) As opposed to Trump, the black female voter is especially invoked as a check on the moral void that would, in the case of Alabama’s special election, allow the election of a candidate who had pursued underage girls and spoken fondly of family life under slavery. Just search for the phrase “Black women warned us” on social media to see the degree to which she is sanctified. Her lack of power and ego makes her the right arbiter of justice. Materially, though, she is ignored, and her efforts to safeguard her own welfare are instead regarded as efforts toward a national salvation. She is of America only because she works for it.

The problem is one of ontology. An inability to imagine black female selfhood is not limited to party lines. The concerns of the black female voter seem to align with those of the white liberal class, but we shouldn’t give into the elision of their agendas. After the Alabama election, Black women on Twitter immediately exposed the spectre of the mammy figure: the stereotype who bustles, coos, and tends to the crises of her oppressors; who works interminably for the health of white society for nothing in return; who, according to the theorist Patricia Hill Collins, “symbolizes the dominant group’s perception of the ideal Black female relationship to elite white male power.” “Black women are not your mammy, America.” “We’re not superheroes. White supremacy and patriarchy do not work in our interest. We saved ourselves.” The activist Charlene Carruthers expanded on Zora Neale’s Hurston observation that the “nigger woman” is the mule of the earth: “Black women are not political mules to be used every time a mediocre white candidate needs to win.”

The country has so many ways to express that it does not know what black women want. The recent expression of awe for the black woman voter is particularly troubling, because it feels like a kind of disclosure: you’d have to be truly isolated from the day-to-day realities of black existence to be shaken by the racial and gendered dimension of Jones’s win. You’d have to be convinced that the mammy is real. What is real, in the state of Alabama, is voter suppression, gerrymandering, and economic disenfranchisement; Bloody Sunday in Selma, fifty-two years ago, is real. Critical nuances—aspects of class and region, especially—are lost when black women become icons, forever trapped in a cycle of ennoblement, flattening, and dehumanization.

A canvasser for Jones, Carissa Crayton, told HuffPost, “We did put in a lot of hard work. We hit the ground running and we did the work that it took to get Doug elected. People shouldn’t disregard that and just think . . . we saved the day without doing any hard work, that we just magically went out and voted and that that’s all we did.” The grassroots organizing done by black women in Alabama in the run-up to Jones’s election shows the work of a political class. Their interests deserve to be known and reported on.