Black Voters: 'The Power's in Our Hands'

In a piece at NewsOne, Tamika Mallory urges black voters not to lose momentum after President Barack Obama's historic re-election, saying that we have to keep moving forward to bring about more important changes. 

Did any of you reading this blog ever visualize being the President of the United States when you were a young person dreaming up potential careers? As children, most of us wanted to be things that were far from our grasp, but when I was a kid growing up in New York, nobody around me ever really dreamed about becoming President of the United States or running for Congress or Senate; it just didn't happen.  Seeing nothing but mostly White men holding local and national office, the idea of one of us leading the way wasn't something we regularly imagined. As a young girl, I aimed high, but females, especially Black females, were not common in national political office where I came from.

But then the election of 2008 happened.

And not only were so many young people of color engaged for the first time, but we saw exactly what happens when we take the time to vote: it was a period of political euphoria.

And now in 2012, we again paid attention to issues we care about like women's rights, health care reform, education, immigration reform, student loan debt, and more. We listened, researched, and we voted.  And it was us – Blacks, Latinos, Asians and women – that largely decided the 2012 election on all levels.

We've got the power; now we have to figure out how to keep using it.

Along with re-electing President Obama, we sent many Congressional and Senate members back to D.C. who sided with fighting for the majority and not the wealthy 1 percent. But we also made strides by electing a record number of women into the Senate. For the first time in U.S. history, women will hold 20 seats in the Senate. We elected the first Asian-American female from the state of Hawaii, and the first openly gay female from the state of Wisconsin. And in the state of New Hampshire, we elected an all-female delegation with two women heading to Congress (the state already has two female Senators).

Read Tamika Mallory's entire piece at NewsOne.

The Root aims to foster and advance conversations about issues relevant to the black Diaspora by presenting a variety of opinions from all perspectives, whether or not those opinions are shared by our editorial staff.

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