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The future of the Democratic Party does not rest on the back of Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California. Furthermore, it is unfair for the Democratic Party to keep hanging its hope on black messianic figures, whom it hopes can bring new relevance to a struggling party. To be clear, there is a lot to like about Harris, the first black woman to hold a Senate position since Carol Moseley-Braun in the 1990s. Despite Ryan Cooper’s screed last week about “why leftists don’t trust Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Deval Patrick,” Harris’s policy positions on free college, single payer health care, an increased minimum wage, and criminal justice reform, are solidly to the left. Still. Black women are not Jesus. It’s not right to expect us to fix what white Americans are so committed to breaking. This debate, then, isn’t about Harris, but about the emotional and political labor that black women are expected to do to save America’s soul.

Since the Nixon-era looms large in this moment when the Trump administration is beset by scandal, it bears noting that this era is the same moment when black women became the official conscience of the American Republic. On July 25, 1974, Congresswoman Barbara D. Jordan, the first black woman elected to the House of Representatives from Texas, gave one of the most important speeches of the Nixon impeachment crisis. She began by reminding her colleagues, “Earlier today, we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, ‘We, the people.’ It is a very eloquent beginning. But when the document was completed on the seventeenth of September 1787 I was not included in that ‘We, the people.’ I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in ‘We, the people.’”

Then, after urging the House to impeach, she said, “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”

Today, Barbara Jordan’s remarks and her loyalty to the promise of the U.S. constitution and her belief in change within the existing system would be perceived as a naïve centrism about the ability and willingness of the U.S. body politic to self-correct and become more inclusive over time. But in that moment, she came to act as the conscience of the nation calling it back to its stated democratic principles. She went on to be a keynote speaker at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. And in 1992, in the aftermath of the LA Race Riots, when Democrats sought to regain control of the presidency, she was again asked to come rally the party to unite behind Bill Clinton.

When Barack Obama, himself a former constitutional law professor emerged on the scene in 2004, reminding the country of its best self, he was using the playbook of Barbara Jordan. In the current moment, Representative Maxine Waters, who is decidedly more phlegmatic than Jordan, has been slotted into this role. While I absolutely love the surly, fuck-deficient manner in which she keeps holding the Trump administration accountable, I am clear that there is a way that we always ask black women to do the labor of saving our democracy. Whether Jordan calling for Nixon’s impeachment, Waters holding Steve Mnuchin’s feet to the fire, or Harris grilling Trump appointees during congressional hearings, black women are always seen as the keepers of our democratic integrity. And then those on the far left use this same labor that we do to save democracy to argue that we are too deeply invested in the establishment.

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Kamala Harris doesn’t have a Bernie Sanders problem. The so-called “Sanders Left” has a black-woman problem. In fact, the entire left has a black-woman problem. On May 25, a group of black women wrote an open letter to DNC Chairman Tom Perez requesting that he meet with black women politicians and policy makers. The letter noted that the 115th Congress has “20 Black women—the largest number in history” and reminded Perez that in 2008 and 2012, black women were the party’s most loyal voting bloc. The DNC refused to even give black women an official response to the letter. I say this, because I want to be clear that the DNC is no friend to black women. However, if 2016 is any indicator, the vast majority of black women rejected the Sanders solution as a model for the kind of left politics that meets their needs.

Sanders’s voters think that black women who care about establishment politics lack vision. They don't get the psychology of black women’s party loyalty. Black feminist theorists beginning with Professor Stanlie James have long talked about what they call the “visionary pragmatism” of black women. They point to the fact that black women typically believe in a brighter future but that they also believe in keeping the lights on and in maintaining a solid foundation upon which to build the future they want to see. You can have a left political vision and a pragmatic approach in the voting booth. Unfortunately demagogues on the left insist that this is a lack of vision.

The DNC is engaging in the kind of moral dishonesty that is rooted in a devaluing of black women’s clear and consistent contributions to the stability and health of the party, but then so is this alleged “Sanders Left.” If everybody’s lying, then it becomes a case of the devil you know (the DNC) versus the devil you don’t (far-left Sanders adherents). And though I’m loathe to relitigate 2016, postmortems can be useful, particularly in untangling the political dishonesty of this moment.

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The biggest lie that members of the so-called “Sanders Left” told during the 2016 elections is that there was no appreciable difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. After six months of having Donald J. Trump lead the country, it’s quite clear that the left should have listened to 94 percent of black women voters. We know a disaster when we see one.

Now, to add insult to injury, those on the left are conceding the political narrative of the right. What do I mean? Did Hillary Clinton lose the election with 3 million more popular votes, or did the Trump campaign collude with the Russians while the GOP engaged in massive voter suppression to steal the election? Yes, I get the electoral college system. However, 3 million more popular votes is a win, and not only is there mounting evidence of collusion, but voter suppression was a significant problem, too. As a black “xennial” voter, I was horrified watching the GOP roll back the protection of the Voting Rights Act in locales across the country. So while it is true that if less than 53 percent of white women had voted for Donald Trump, Clinton’s popular victory might have been more resounding, there is something deeply wrong with a Left that thinks the first problem in a stolen democratic election is not theft and voter suppression but a failure to run up the vote totals on the clearly winning side.

It is also true that after a failure, the responsible, adult thing to do is to figure out how you could have done things differently. The Clinton campaign miscalculated in deciding that the future of American politics lay with white centrist voters rather than young left-leaning voters of color. But that miscalculation doesn’t change the fact that Hillary Clinton got more votes than any other Democratic candidate in history save Barack Obama. If we’re going to be adults about it, then the "Sanders Left" needs to admit something critical. Though black voters under 30 favored Sanders in the primaries, they also voted in very low numbers. Black voters over 30 favored Clinton to the tune of 70 percent (and people 30 and over are millennial voters, too). This means that for the majority of African American voters, even in the primaries, the Sanders message simply did not resonate.

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This then is not actually a debate about Kamala Harris or her policy propositions. Her policies, particularly her connections to shady corporate figures like Steve Mnuchin, certainly deserve scrutiny, as they do for all politicians. In the case of Mnuchin, she decided not to prosecute him for a series of alleged illegal foreclosures in California, but then took a campaign contribution from him. However, she also has a record of fighting hard to protect homeowners. Branding her as an establishment Democratic, though she is solidly to the left on most issues that the Sanders bloc cares about is not the way to hold her accountable.

Ryan Cooper tries and fails to preempt arguments about his response to Kamala Harris, saying that critics might argue that, “The left just doesn't like minority or female candidates because they are racist and sexist.” He characterizes these arguments as trying to “win dirty.” White men on both the right and the left always like to remind us, when they are disagreeing with black candidates, that everything is not about racism. They can disagree with people’s policy positions on the merits. That is, of course, true.

But a dirty win is actually one predicated on blaming black women and black politicians more generally for failing to save America from itself once again, and then claiming that race and gender have nothing to do with the targets of your ire. Sanders Democrats are mad that black women didn’t think a critique of capitalism absolved the radical left of needing to deal forthrightly with racism and sexism.

Ryan Cooper comes for the only two black Democratic senators in Congress and says it’s not about race but about their ties to big capital. If white folks on the radical left had a better racial analysis, they might ask whether it is possible for black candidates to win the presidency or become senators if they have a political analysis that comes after big banks and overtly and explicitly supports black communities. Barack Obama won the presidency in ways Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton never could. His blackness was palatable, while theirs was deemed a threat. Moreover, how is it, after Citizens United, the case in which the Supreme Court held that corporations are people and therefore entitled to donate big sums of money to superpacs privately, that black candidates can win without the support of dark, corporate money?

In 2016, we were offered two kinds of revolution, one in which the “Sanders Left” tore shit down and one in which the Trump Right tore shit up. Surely you can see why black women, the ones who have been called to take the scraps handed to us by the nation and painstakingly build communities, families, and institutions, would turn down the sledgehammer no matter which white hand was holding it. Revolutionary destruction is still destruction, and black folks are the casualties of these kinds of political visions. Kamala Harris has work to do. But bearing the cross of the Democratic Party and fighting off angry white Sanders voters isn’t her work. So get off her back, and let her soar. In case you missed the memo: Black women are reclaiming our time.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Barbara Jordan spoke at the 1996 Democratic National Convention. She spoke at the 1992 convention. This has been corrected.

Brittney Cooper is the author of and the upcoming Follow her on Twitter.

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