Black Feminist Politics
“With historical rigor and theoretical clarity, Harris centers Black women as architects of democratic transformation—challenging long standing narratives that marginalize their intellectual and political labor.”
—Pearl K. Dowe, Emory University
President of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS)
Author, “The Radical Imagination of Black Women: Ambition, Politics, and Power
Coming August 2026
1965 was the pivotal year in which the Voting Rights Act fundamentally transformed political participation for African Americans. It was also the year Kamala Harris was born. This temporal convergence serves as the book’s organizing framework, illustrating how the expansion of voting rights and the evolution of Black feminist politics created the conditions that made Harris’s Vice Presidency possible. Drawing on political science, history, gender studies, and Black feminist theory, the chapters trace major developments in U.S. political life from 1965 to 2025.
By situating Kamala Harris’s Vice Presidency within a broader historical trajectory, the book demonstrates that Black feminist political behavior is indispensable to understanding the development of modern U.S. democracy.
“Anyone who wants to understand our current American political landscape must understand Black Feminist thought.”
—Heath Fogg Davis, Temple University
Director of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program and Associate Professor of Political Science
About Duchess
Duchess Harris, JD, PhD, is Professor of American Studies and Political Science and the Chair of the History Department at Macalester College. She is a founder in the field of the study of Black women in politics. Her research has been supported by the Mellon, Rockefeller, and Woodrow Wilson foundations, and she is widely recognized for her contributions to interdisciplinary scholarship and public-facing intellectual work. Harris has appeared in the Washington Post, on Al Jazeera, and CBS Sunday News, This Morning. She is the Vice President of the MN Association of Black Lawyers and the recipient of their Profiles in Courage Award. Harris is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., Minneapolis-St. Paul Chapter of The Links, Inc., and Minneapolis Chapter of Jack & Jill of America.