Black Women and the Blue Wave

While scrolling through social media, I came across an influencer who said, “You take our DEI, we take your government.” It was amusing, but it wasn’t too far from the truth.

For Black women, the last two years have felt like a steady push out of rooms they spent decades earning a place in. One of the first moves of the second Trump administration was to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government, and many private companies followed. That path narrowed quickly. Black women lost 95,371 federal jobs in 2025, about a third of all federal job losses that year. Their federal employment fell by more than 30 percent, compared to 11.6 percent for all women and 8.1 percent for men. Across the wider economy, with the help of Elon Musk and the DOGE crew, they ended 2025 with a net loss of 113,000 jobs, and at one point accounted for more than half of all job losses among women. Their unemployment rate climbed from 5.4 percent to 7.3 percent. These weren't abstract figures. They were mothers, lawyers, analysts and program managers who were told their work no longer mattered.

Keisha Lance Bottoms

Georgia Governor Elect

Keisha previously served as the 60th Mayor of Atlanta, where she steered the city through a pandemic, secured major investments in affordable housing, delivered a historic pay raise for Atlanta’s first responders, became a national leader on civil rights reforms, supported small business and economic opportunity and balanced the budget. Read More: https://www.keishaforgovernor.com/bio#

Then came Tuesday. Keisha Lance Bottoms won the race for governor of Georgia and will become the first Black woman ever elected governor of a U.S. state. Penny Brown Reynolds was elected Georgia's secretary of state, the first Black woman to oversee the state's elections. Tanya Miller won attorney general, the first woman and first Black woman to hold that office in Georgia. These wins happened in the Deep South, where Black voters were once kept from the ballot by law and by force, and where fights over voting access never really ended. A Black woman now running the office responsible for Georgia's elections is not a small detail. It's a correction that has been a long time coming.

Tanya Miller

Tanya Miller is a respected trial attorney, a proven leader as Chair of the Georgia House Democratic Caucus and a fierce advocate for Georgians. Her career has been defined by one core principle: the law should serve people, not political interests. Read More: https://www.tanyaforgeorgia.com/about

Georgia Attorney General Elect

The country shouldn't read this as an ordinary midterm swing. Voters watched an administration treat diversity like a dirty word. They watched Black women lose jobs at rates no other group experienced, and they heard open racism return to political speech with little apology. Then they answered. Exit polls showed 93 percent of Black women backed Democratic House candidates, and turnout in parts of the South was so heavy it strained polling places. The message is plain. When a government targets a group of people, they don't disappear. They organize, and this time a lot of other voters stood with them.

Penny Brown Reynolds

Most recently, she was appointed to the Biden-Harris Administration as Acting Assistant Secretary and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights and Chief EEO Officer at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. There, she led civil rights enforcement and strategy for over 100,000 employees, slashing a historic case backlog by over 90% and implementing the agency’s first-ever 5-year strategic plan. She led boldly—because transformational leadership demanded it. https://www.pennyforgeorgia.com/meet-judge-penny

Georgia Secretary of State Elect

Black voters can't treat Tuesday as a finish line. Show up for city council and school board races. Call your representatives. Hold the people you elected accountable too. Two years ago I asked whether America was ready to trust Black women with real power. Tuesday gave a hopeful answer. Keeping it that way is on us.

Thomas Y. Lynch

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