Put your Shoes On – There’s Glass Everywhere.

Mango trench
& Other Stories tee
Sezane jeans
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RayBan sunglasses
Celine necklace
Stella & Dot ring
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: The Ambassador Apartments – Winnipeg, Manitoba

On Saturday afternoon, Kamala Harris shattered one of, if not the, highest glass cielings. (Reason prevailed in the end and I am grateful, although the fact is, this is just the beginning. Americans will now need to hold their new leader accountable to make real, and desperately needed, change.) It reminded me of how much I hoped that Hillary would triumph in 2016, but how certain I was that she wouldn’t. Men, as a collective, will always vote for other men, even men they disagree with, before they will vote for women. And they did exactly that this year – they voted for Joe Biden. But a vote for Joe Biden was a vote for Kamala Harris, too. A vote for a female, black and South Asian person.

(Note: I have edited the sentence above based on a particularly vitriolic series of comments I received on this post, which you will see below. While their author fails to make a cogent argument for their case, and, if I’m honest, it’s unclear what their case actually is, I accept their premise that it is more correct to refer to Kamala Harris as black than as African American. On this, and this alone, I stand corrected.)

Two days later, there is still glass everywhere.

(Notably, it was African American women who voted for Biden and Harris in the most overwhelming numbers. Men voted, for the most part, exactly as they did in the 2016 election.)

It will be fascinating to see what the future brings for women in the wake of this historical moment. I am optimistic, but only cautiously so. After all, Canada inaugurated its first female prime minister, Kim Campbell, in 1992. We haven’t inaugurated another one since. And we’ve never elected a person of colour to the office of prime minister. In fact, we’ve never even come close.

…because the thing is, there is glass everywhere, but that only means the invisible but ever present cieling that holds women and people of colour in their place below white men is broken right now, temporarily out of the way. Cielings can be rebuilt. We rebuild them often. The act of breaking the cieling is really just the beginning. Once it’s broken, we need to continue to fight every single day to keep the metaphorical builders from putting it right back up.

So put your shoes on. There’s glass everywhere, and we need to go on breaking it every single day. The only way out is through.

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