Blississippi and the Blues!

The blue wave that swept across America in the midterms took a little longer to reach Mississippi. Then came the call. The Associated Press projected that Scott Colom had won the U.S. Senate race, putting him on course to become Mississippi’s first Black U.S. senator since Reconstruction. Some are calling it the Blunami. Allow me a moment of Blississippi.

And when I say Mississippi, I think of Freedom Summer. I think of Fannie Lou Hamer and the people who risked their jobs, their homes, and their lives for the right to vote. I think of those who died before they could see what their courage made possible. The joy I feel today belongs alongside that memory. We owe them more than a mention when history is made. We owe them a democracy worthy of what they gave.

I read these returns through a Motherist lens. I saw women of color organizing, and I paid particular attention to Black women. After Kamala Harris’s defeat, some people mistook our quiet for withdrawal. There’s an old saying for that. “All shut eye ain’t sleep.”

Some of us were grieving. Some were resting and strategizing. Many were carrying families through economic uncertainty while facing losses of their own. By December 2025, 113,000 fewer Black women were employed than in January of that year, according to an analysis of federal labor data by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Behind that number are households trying to pay the rent and women who are so often expected to care for everybody else while figuring out how to keep themselves afloat.

Rest gave some of us time to ask where our energy was needed and how we wanted to use it. When the time came to act, we did what we knew how to do. We talked with neighbors, organized in our communities, and showed up. We did it for ourselves, for a country our ancestors helped build, and for the children who will live with the decisions we make now. All our children.

Motherism brings me back to a question I carry into every conversation about leadership. What are we sustaining? I ask what people need to live with dignity, whose experience will shape the decisions, and who will bear the cost when leaders get it wrong. And I ask a question that makes the responsibility personal. Would my ancestors approve of what we do with the power they fought for us to have?

I read this blue wave as a rebuke to autocracy, racist backlash, and an economy that tolerates suffering while wealth and influence concentrate in fewer hands. I also hear an affirmation of things we ought to be able to expect from our common life. People should be able to earn a living that sustains a household. They should have a meaningful say in how they are governed. And if we say we love our neighbors, that love ought to be visible in the decisions we make about whose needs count.

The election gives Democrats an opportunity and gives the rest of us a responsibility to hold them to it. When the celebration quiets, I’ll be looking at who gets heard, whose work is valued, and whether families can feel the difference in their daily lives. That is where this victory will meet the democratic promise Fannie Lou Hamer and so many others insisted belonged to them, too.

#motherism #blue wave #black women win #ancestors