By Liz Courquet-Lesaulnier | Word In Black
(WIB) – You know the list. President Donald Trump definitely does.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama. Former Vice President Kamala Harris. Former Georgia House Speaker Stacey Abrams. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Reps. Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Maxine Waters of California. Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. Carla Hayden, the former Librarian of Congress. New York Attorney General Letitia James. Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis.
Since returning to power, Trump has, one by one, singled out powerful Black women — maligning their intelligence and competence, questioning their legitimacy, spitting out insults and mocking their appearance, attacking their very presence in public life.
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Now, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook has joined the sorority.
“For the first time in 111 years,” Crockett observed on social media, “a President is planning to fire a sitting Fed governor — and of course, it’s the first Black woman.”
In more than a century of Federal Reserve history, no president has ever attempted to oust a sitting member of its Board of Governors mid-term. But on August 25, after several days of publicly pressuring her to resign, Trump announced that Cook had been fired for cause, specifically, “deceitful and potentially criminal conduct.”
Never mind that, as Cook pointed out, “no cause exists under the law, and [Trump] has no authority to do so.” Cook promised to see him in court. Her attorney, Abbe Lowell, was equally blunt: saying that the president’s action “lacks any factual or legal basis.”
The New York Times called out the game this week — “Mr. Trump has made little secret of his true aim. He wants to control the Fed” — noting that Trump’s actions are a threat to the nation’s economic stability.
But they’re also a racist dogwhistle that, legality be damned, it’s open season on Black women in America.
“Trump’s message is clear: when Black women rise, he’ll do anything to push us down,” Crockett said. “Newsflash: we’re not going anywhere.”
A Manufactured Scandal
Cook is no intellectual or political lightweight. A distinguished economist, appointed to the Fed in 2022 by President Biden. Spelman, Oxford, and U.C. Berkeley-educated, her research has shaped policy on economic inequality and growth.
And she’s no stranger to speaking up about racism. In a 2019 op-ed in The New York Times, she kept it real: “[if] economics is hostile to women, it is especially antagonistic to Black women.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s accusations against her center on allegations she has committed mortgage fraud which mirrors the very misconduct for which he himself has been found liable.
It’s open season on Black women in America.
And the sketchy claim did not emerge from any official investigation but from William Pulte, a Trump sycophant who oversees the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Pulte has developed a habit of using mortgage filings as a political weapon. He’s leveled similar dubious accusations at two other Trump’s political adversaries: Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who led Trump’s first impeachment trial, and James, who won a massive, $500 million fraud judgment against the Trump Organization.
Astute observers have not been fooled.
Political commentator Elizabeth Booker Houston put it plainly on Threads: Trump “can’t stand a Black woman working to protect American consumers from a financial crisis.”
Journalist Michele Norris warned the Fourth Estate against amplifying Trump’s blatantly coercive narrative about Cook: “To say she has already been removed or fired is speaking an aspirational hatchet into existence before ’cause’ or legality has been established”
“Diffuse Massive Disdain for Black Women”
Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist, pointed out that leaders in the infamous, dog-eat-dog, white male-dominated field of economics are “coming out in droves to support Lisa, legitimate her bona fides, and warn that Trump taking over the Fed would be disastrous.”
That’s how serious this is.
“Ask yourself if YOUR workplace would defend a Black female colleague this vociferously,” Cottom wrote on Bluesky. Spoiler: probably not.
She also noted in an Instagram Live how Black women are being shoved out of the workforce. Reports say 300,000 Black women “left” the labor market last quarter.
No, they didn’t. Let’s be real: they were forced out, let go, fired.
In our current anti-woke, anti-DEI era, Black women are being pushed out under the guise of budget cuts and layoffs and right-sizing the federal government. We’re pink slipped when universities and nonprofits and newsrooms are defunded. As Cottom said, she’s had “heart-wrenching conversations” with women she knows who were among the 300,000.
“I don’t get the sense that there is as much a hit list for Black women — like there are for like political enemies — so much as there is just a sort of diffuse massive disdain for Black women. And whatever Black woman bubbles up in any particular moment can become the target, can become the vehicle for sort of white rage,” she said.
And the anger against Black women, she contends, goes deeper: just ask Claudine Gay, the Harvard University president who was forced out on specious allegations of plagiarism. While Trump and conservatives are the biggest perpetrator, Cottom points out, “patriarchal” white men are on both sides of the aisle.
”Powerful white men are punishing Black women for radicalizing white women because we were the face of Black Lives Matter, because we were the face of DEI, because we were the face of the social justice reading groups, because we wrote the books, because we were the pundits and the commentators on news media,” she said. “I think that they blame Black women for radicalizing white women.”
Ultimately, Cook’s fate will be decided in court. But it’s clear the stakes for us all are so much larger.