She Plays Chess

It is no secret that I love and admire powerful women. The defining characteristic is not always the position that a particular woman holds, but it is in the way she wields her influence--how she uses her powers for good, if you will. This admiration is typically nonpartisan and definitely not specific to Black women--in the past I have even gone so far as to allow some non-Black women to be addressed with honorary Busy Black status.

I won't offer an exhaustive list of names, but this week has been a great week for Busy Black Women in Washington. There is Nancy Pelosi, an expert mover and shaker, who deftly handled our Petulant President this week and then there is Kamala Harris, a rising star who has set her sights on relieving him of his Oval Office occupancy in 2020.

I am here for it. 

This is my giddy face.

Of course, I am also keenly aware that my excitement is not universally shared by the rest of the world. I need only turn to social media to see that for every power move these women make, there are beer mugs filling up with the salty tears of men who are feeling some kind of way about having the world change in their lifetime. Men who are fighting back against the injustice of not being able to hear their favorite Christmas song on the radio in Cleveland. Men who are upset that a certain R&B singer has to answer for decades of sexual abuse against young women. Grown ass men who are upset over a razor commercial.

Men who don't like to be out-maneuvered by a woman who has the Constitutional prerogative to decide whether to give the President of the United States the platform to speak in her House. Men who believe it is part of their job to demand that a woman prove her legitimacy for higher office.

Sure, Busy Black Women in positions of great power can and will make costly mistakes that might be their undoing. Theresa May will probably be remembered as the woman who negotiated the world's most disastrous divorce settlement in a botched Brexit. It is ironic when you realize that Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, lauded for her courage as the face of democratic resistance in Myanmar, is now presiding over a genocide. What can I say, we fail bigly too. But that comes with the territory.

For the record, this isn't a gloat because as the title suggests, there are more moves on the board. The game never ends, it stalls and sometimes has to be suspended, but this is just my way of informing the uninitiated that Busy Black Women are serious. The game is chess, not checkers and we play to win. Because anything men can do women can do too--backwards and in heels.