By the close of September, Kamala Harris’ campaign had raised more than $1 billion to support her candidacy, NBC News and multiple outlets reported earlier today. The amount includes monies raised by the campaign and joint efforts with the Democratic National Committee and its state affiliates. Harris can now do what was perhaps completely unexpected when President Biden stepped out of the race on July 21 so that she could take the reins.

It took the Vice President only two months to pull those funds together, making NBC News and other mainstream outlets concede that the excitement around Harris–unlike the center that poet WB Yeats wrote during the First World War–would appear to have held. Surely, her debate performance helped, as likely did the slippages Trump has demonstrated–along with his messages of doom, gloom, and hate.

The Times had this to say:

“Past presidential candidates, including Joseph R. Biden and Mr. Trump four years ago, have [each] raised more than $1 billion together with their parties.

Mr. Trump announced that he had surpassed that mark in July 2020, after he had been raising funds for his re-election for multiple years.

It is the sheer speed with which Ms. Harris has reached the $1 billion threshold that is notable. No presidential candidate is believed to have ever raised so much so fast after entering a race…”

Trump has rich friends too! (Maybe just really hopeful friends.)

Elon Musk, who has ensured he’s seen and known as the supervillain he perhaps always has been, has made his super PAC and a whole bunch of in-kind advertising on the platform formerly known as free,  work for Trump. There are others in the vulgarly wealthy class–Peter Thiel, for example, the founder of PayPal–doing the most with their big money to shepherd the ex-president back into the house he literally intended to stay squatted in. But their money cannot buy what it appears the majority of voters in this country are craving, the thing Trump seems entirely incapable of offering: hope.

Of course many don’t read anything credible–meaning anything evidence-based–about the economy or the state of the world Trump left in his wake. Perhaps they feel something sort of akin to hope. I don’t know what to call it, but I can describe it. It’s what a person feels when, despite losing their home or starving, or despite knowing they’re losing the battle against their own disease of despair and no hope coming ’round the bend, they at least have this sort-of-akin-to-hope emotion that allows them to believe Trump agrees that their white skin mattered to him.

More legitimately, hope for a Trump presidency lives among members of the vulgarly wealthy class who most certainly would have an even grander tax shelter under his rule. And as for rights, they could be bought, sort of like they are now, only probably more openly, probably without shame. But these truths generate something like hope. Not the thing itself.

A legacy unbroken

The kind of hope that carries people over the rough waters has been seeded in Kamala Harris’ run, and her run only–whether or not one believes it’s been planted in the right soil. Across the nation, people feel the specific peace that comes with the kind of hope the Harris campaign has brought since July 21. They’re breathing the rush of air that kind of hope ushers in, and no group more so than the one that America’s always gone to when they’ve had the wisdom to breathe a different air: Black women. They’re who made this moment possible, announcing it publicly within an hour of the Vice President declaring her candidacy.

And truly, who other than Black women could have done this?

Black women who survived off little else but the kind of hope that never fully disappears. The kind that we have always somehow known and known soul-deep, despite how it could make itself shape-shift, make itself invisible. It wasn’t. It was there before any of our births. It had been bequeathed to us 20 generations before by foremothers who’d summoned something incomprehensible: a hope borne of women who had walk-on-water faith and saw free children, even as chains bound them tighter and without reprieve to a nation founded as their death camp, a nation founded only after it was agreed that these women, their men and their babies were legally not human. A nation that has never had a full reckoning with that original sinful law nor its violently entrenched consequences.

MAGAs don’t know that kind of hope.

Nor do they know the kind of hope the Harris candidacy inspired in the families of women who died as a result of Trump’s successful campaign of terror that stole the body sovereignty and right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness from 50 percent of America’s population simply because they were born with ovaries and a vagina.

Those families know a full, thick, painful and pleading kind of hope, as in: Please God please don’t let another mother’s daughter lose their life because they were born daughter.

It’s a Mother Emmanuel choir’s kind of hope that includes the wrenching harmony heard coming from the throat of every Sybrina Fulton, every Samaria Rice who may be known by other names but whose hearts were broken in exactly the same way.  Or else the mothers whose children had virtually no option other than the option to be the soldiers made to stand before the firing squad that is America’s deadly militarized adventurism–the monster from our nightmares that swallows all the young people whole.

That one or else the other monster, the one in real life that dismissed the deaths of their dead children with the same breath-stealing callousness he dismissed the deaths of 400,000 people–that was a number of the dead on the day Trump was stopped from becoming the first-ever squatter in the White House. The mothers of those dead know the hope that drives the prayer they’re forced to speak: Please do not let the next leader of this country publicly and cruelly dishonor my baby. Please God please.

It’s the kind of love-anchored hope that’s impossible to release and impossible to hold without experiencing a pain that cannot be named or explained or abated. They hold anyway.

They hold it the way the small brown hands of the 1 in 3 Black children hold it–and their grumbling stomaches pleading: Please God please, can the next round of money be used to allow all of us to eat?

SEE ALSO:

‘Say Her Name’: At DNC,  Kerry Washington, VP Harris’ Grandnieces, Teach America How To Properly Pronounce ‘Kamala’

Black Voter Registration Rates Surge Amid Kamala Harris’ Historic Candidacy, Data Shows