Don’t Say Her Name Now: Y’all Laughed When VP Harris Warned Us About War
There’s something especially sinister about selective memory. It doesn’t just rewrite the truth—it weaponizes it. And lately, I’ve been watching people invoke Vice President Kamala Harris’s name with the kind of performative concern that makes me want to throw my phone across the room.
Now that the storm clouds of war are no longer distant, suddenly everyone wants to talk about what “Kamala said.”
Suddenly her warnings matter.
Suddenly her analysis is valid.
Suddenly we’re supposed to pretend like y’all didn’t scoff when she stood on the world stage and said, with a tone Black women know all too well: They’re coming. Don’t blink.
But y’all blinked. Worse—you joked. You reduced her to punchlines. Turned her foreign policy briefings into memes. Laughed at her cadence, mocked her analogies, questioned her intellect, and discarded her insight—because her voice didn’t sound like yours, or maybe because her warning didn’t align with your comfort. And now? Now you’re scared. And instead of accountability, y’all are offering up her name as an afterthought. A prophecy y’all never wanted to believe.
Let’s be real: VP Harris didn’t just warn us once. She’s been raising alarms in nearly every continent she’s visited—whether about global destabilization, digital authoritarianism, rising fascism, or the long arc of Russian aggression. And every time she stepped to a podium to say it plain, y’all clowned her. You mocked her tone, her laughter, her gender, her Blackness. And now you want to quote her?
Don’t say her name now.
Not if you weren’t willing to defend her when she was speaking truth in real time. Not if you were one of the ones who edited her speeches for clicks instead of clarity. Not if you failed to see that her warnings weren’t gaffes—they were grief premonitions. Strategic grief. Diplomatic grief. The kind that Black women carry when we’re constantly asked to deliver truth into rooms already closed to us.
This isn’t just about Kamala. It’s about what it costs Black women to lead.
Because let’s be clear—when Kamala Harris said the world was at an inflection point, she wasn’t reading from a speechwriter’s cue card. She was offering you intel. She was naming a shift in geopolitical fault lines that our generation may not recover from. She was mapping out how conflict—real conflict—is rarely a single act but a web of neglected warnings, appeased aggressors, and silenced visionaries. And once again, a Black woman saw it before you did.
But you didn’t want that from her. You wanted her smiling and silent. Or you wanted her gone. Or better yet—somehow visible but irrelevant.
That’s what this country often does to Black women in power:
Demands their visibility.
Then dilutes their voice.
Then questions their very presence.
Then pretends they were never right to begin with.
So no, I don’t want to hear folks suddenly “respecting” her foreign policy chops now that the bombs are dropping and the headlines are giving Cold War sequel energy. You don’t get to pick up her prophecy like it’s a forgotten purse now that it matches your outfit of outrage.
You don’t get to quote her warnings if you never honored her wisdom.
You don’t get to amplify her accuracy if you were complicit in her erasure.
You don’t get to need her now.
Because when Black women warn you, it’s not for applause. It’s because the sky really is falling.
And instead of listening, you laughed. You minimized. You disappeared her urgency under the guise of critique. And now that the cost of your dismissal is stacking, now that war is no longer hypothetical, now that leadership requires more than vibes—you want to pretend she was your Cassandra all along?
Let me say this plainly: Kamala Harris owes you nothing.
And history is already doing what it always does—proving Black women right long after y’all chose not to listen.
So here’s your accountability, not your comfort:
If you didn’t believe her then, own it.
If you silenced her warnings with your smugness, sit with it.
And if you’re only now realizing that she’s the one who named the season we’re in before it arrived, ask yourself why it took you this long.
Because if the world is on fire, it’s not because Kamala didn’t warn you.
It’s because y’all didn’t care to hear her until the flames touched your doorstep.
And that’s not prophecy.
That’s the price of your pride.
Leadership Access Points
Honor the voice before the crisis. Black women’s warnings aren’t late-breaking news—they’re long-ignored truths.
You can’t meme your way through policy. Discomfort with delivery doesn’t excuse discrediting sound strategy.
Credibility isn’t retroactive. If you didn’t value her voice then, be humble enough to repent now.
Let this be a moment of reckoning—for how we listen, who we trust, and what we do when prophetic voices try to save us from ourselves.
Because some warnings don’t come with sirens.
Sometimes, they come with pearls, a podium, and the audacity to speak through your doubt.
—Dr. Xavier D. Clark