Cheri Hall woke up hours before dawn the morning after Election Day and checked her phone anxiously for results. A news notification hinting that former President Donald J. Trump had defeated Vice President Kamala Harris caused her to gasp and grab her chest.
“I felt it in my entire body,” said Ms. Hall, 49, who is a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant in Washington, D.C. “I was heartbroken.”
Black women voters supported Ms. Harris in overwhelming numbers — upward of 90 percent cast ballots for her, according to some exit poles. And her loss, as the first Black woman presidential nominee, left supporters such as Ms. Hall feeling disillusioned. On social media, under hashtags like #blackwomenrest and #restera, some women have emphasized that after turning out strong for Ms. Harris, they feel unappreciated and defeated, and are ready to bow out of the political and culture wars, for now, to focus on their personal well-being.
“Our feelings are hurt,” said Vernique Esther Ofili, 31, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist in Atlanta. “We get to decide how we respond.”
The weekend after Mr. Trump’s victory, Ms. Hall told her 4,000-plus TikTok followers that she would be taking what she calls “the great Black step back.” She won’t allow herself to feel consumed by national politics, she said, and she instead plans to focus on her mental and physical health by exercising and no longer molding herself to please others.
Although Mr. Trump’s first presidential victory in 2016 worried Ms. Hall, she thought it might have been a fluke, that some voters overlooked his dearth of experience in politics and “bought what he was selling” because he was a prominent businessman, she said. And his triumph, despite a long history of allegations of racism and sexism, was a “harsh reminder” of the role racism could play in American politics, she added.
Nevertheless, Ms. Hall still wanted to engage with politics back then to witness “how this foolishness plays out,” she said. But this time, Mr. Trump’s success — and Ms. Harris’s defeat despite her qualifications — “felt very, very personal,” she said. It almost felt like a rejection of not just Ms. Harris but of all Black women in the United States, Ms. Hall added. In the wake of the election, checking the news every morning just became too much for her to bear.
“I think of this as our opportunity to decenter everyone and focus on us,” Ms. Hall said in the video, in which she wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase “minding my black-owned business.”
So what does a “rest era” look like? In interviews and online, some Black women said it could mean striving for more sleep, declining extra responsibilities at work or exploring new hobbies. Others said it might mean volunteering in local Black communities, eating more healthfully, spending time with loved ones or simply allowing themselves to grieve the election’s outcome or distance themselves from national politics.
These public declarations of stepping back are a shift from the leadership role Black women have historically played in politics, said Inger Burnett-Zeigler, an associate professor of psychiatry at Northwestern University and author of the book “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen: The Emotional Lives of Black Women.” Black women have been at the vanguard of political and social movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, as well as mobilizations to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016 and President Biden in 2020.
“It’s an important step in two things: in boundary setting and in recognizing what’s in your control,” Dr. Burnett-Zeigler said.
The push for Black women to prioritize self-preservation has been percolating for years, said Tricia Hersey, the founder of the Nap Ministry, an organization that has promoted rest as a form of resistance against productivity-obsessed cultures. She saw it gain support in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder by a police officer made people “sick and tired of feeling horrible,” she said.
“This has been already bubbling,” Ms. Hersey said. The election results “became more of a tipping point for a lot of people,” she added.
Focusing on personal wellness might feel in conflict with the cultural archetype of the strong Black woman — one who cares for others often at the expense of her own physical and emotional needs, said Amani Nuru-Jeter, a professor of community health sciences and epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley.
When Black women feel obligated to uphold this persona, Dr. Nuru-Jeter added, they may “present an image of strength, even when one doesn’t feel strong.” But experts said that this idea of strength also involves resilience and self-reliance, which some Black women may now be leveraging for their own benefit by choosing to rest.
Ms. Ofili said discovering that Ms. Harris had lost the election felt like a “slap in the face,” but she believes Black women are “no longer concealing those feelings anymore in order to be seen as a strong Black woman.” In coming months, Ms. Ofili plans to rest by pursuing a personal goal: To honor her grandmother who was a seamstress, she’ll finally use the sewing machine she was given seven years ago.
For Amber Anyanwu, 34, a family nurse practitioner and social media influencer in Houston, rest means deleting news apps on her phone and revisiting childhood hobbies such as gymnastics class. Mrs. Anyanwu is looking to pick up the guitar and piano, too.
After Mr. Trump was elected, Oinetta Kambui, 52, a recruiter and TikTok creator in Jacksonville, Fla., hopped on a phone call with her sisters. They all agreed: Many Black women “just want to be literally left alone to tend to our own communities,” she said.
Although Mrs. Kambui has joined civil rights protests in the past, she doesn’t plan to participate in any in the near future, she said, unless they involve her own community.
“We are opting out,” she said. “From now on, we’re going to mind our business.”
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