IVYPAC is a group of politically-savvy women from across the United States working to help elect Alpha Kappa Alpha sisters to Congress. In 2018, they endorsed Lauren Underwood, who won a stunning upset against a four-term GOP incumbent. So especially since there’s such broad agreement Black women are a major force in the Democratic Party, IVYPAC’S announcement of a Twenty State GOTV Push for Senator Kamala Harris (the only AKA sister running for President in 2020) is another good sign for the Harris.
Here’s what I get from Google News if I do a search for “ivypac kamala harris”
Higher Heights is the largest online political organization dedicated to harnessing, organizing and mobilizing Black women’s political power, with over 90,000 members. They’ve been building out the #BlackWomenVote campaign for over a year — and, most political analysts would agree, Black women are a major force in the Democratic Party.
So even though Higher Heights endorsement of Sen. Kamala Harris wasn’t the only significant endorsement that was announced last week, it’s a pretty big deal.
Here’s what I get when I search Google news for “Kamala Harris endorsements”:
And here’s what I get from doing the same search on reddit:
Kamala Harris is empirically mentioned less often than other candidates, even when there is every reason to center her in a news story.
Yeah really. And of course it’s not just Harris; Higher Heights is also getting erased here.
In my next post, I’ll look at another significant endorsement from last week. First, though, here’s Kamala Harris talking with Zerlina Maxwell and Jess McIntosh on Signal Boost on SiriusXM Progress. The tweet has a short video, and a link of to SiriusXM for the full discussion.
Missed @ZerlinaMaxwell & @jess_mc‘s chat with @KamalaHarris from this week? Especially the part where she talked about the ongoing media erasure of her campaign?
DRAFT! Feedback welcome!
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Black Womxn For, a group of 100 Black women, gender non-conforming, and non-binary, and queer folk, endorsed Elizabeth Warren on Thursday. Since as is generally acknowledged Black women are the reliable base of the Democratic party, and one of the biggest questions about Warren’s campaign is whether she can appeal to Black voters in general, this is a pretty big deal.
The top stories throughout the day on Google News and reddit’s r/politics throughout the day were about Trump, Michael Bloomberg, Trump and Bill Barr, Tom Steyer, Rudy Giuliani, Trump, Jim Jordan, …
Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here.
Sure, these are all legitimate news stories, but so is an endorsement from 100 activists from a demographic that’s the Democrats’ strongest supporters — and Warren quite rightly describes as “the backbone of our democracy. So not showing this story is a great example of the dynamics Safiya Noble describes in Algorithms of Oppression. Algorithms privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
The frustrating thing is that it doesn’t have to be that way. The Nexus Today is a news aggregator that focuses on amplifying marginalized voices … and guess what, the top stories on the politics page on Thursday were about the Black Womxn For endorsement. I would love to say this is because of a brilliant algorithmic breakthrough, but no, actually it turns out that even straightforward techniques work well.
It’s almost like the Googles and Reddits of the world don’t even try.
