The Left Has a Misogynoir Problem Too
03.10.26
We need to talk about misogynoir. Not as an academic term or a buzzword, but as something that happened, in real time, this week to two Black women who refuse to back down.
Misogynoir is the specific, compounded targeting of Black women at the intersection of anti-Black racism and sexism. It’s what happens when a Black woman is dismissed with particular venom for being “too loud,” “too aggressive,” “too much,” while simultaneously being called not enough. When the same woman asked to do the most is given the least protection, the least grace, and the least credit.
It happened to Rep. Jasmine Crockett last Tuesday night in Dallas County. It also happened to Elizabeth Booker Houston who was responsible for organizing content creators for her campaign.
Both come after months, years even, of sustained hate campaigns against them as Black women in America. Let’s dive in.
What Happened to Jasmine
Before last Tuesday, Dallas County Republicans changed the rules of how voting worked and didn’t bother to tell anyone.
In previous elections, voters could cast a ballot at any polling location in the county. For this primary, they were required to appear at their specific assigned precinct. The change was not communicated before Election Day, so hundreds of voters showed up to the wrong location and were turned away. Then the county elections website crashed under the volume of people scrambling to figure out where they were supposed to go.
Dallas County is a Crockett stronghold. This disruption hit hardest where her voters were concentrated.
A county judge ordered polls to stay open two extra hours. Then Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (who was simultaneously running in the Republican Senate primary) asked the Texas Supreme Court to block that extension and throw out any votes cast after 7 p.m. The court complied.
What we witnessed last Tuesday night – changing rules with no notice and throwing out votes in a Black woman’s stronghold – was blatant voter suppression.
Ken Paxton doing what Ken Paxton does though is not in itself surprising. He has made a career of this. What is worth sitting with is what happened after, inside our own party. After Crockett conceded in what became the most expensive Senate primary in Texas history, the conversation in Democratic circles was not about the state that sabotaged its own election. It was about whether Crockett’s strategy was flawed. Whether her tone was too combative and whether she was “electable.” Whether her campaign should have “anticipated” the rule change and done more outreach to compensate for the institutional failure being used against her.
Read that again: a Black woman was expected to personally prevent the chaos created by a hostile state apparatus that was designed to make her lose and, when she couldn’t, the critique landed on her.
What we witnessed last Tuesday night – changing rules with no notice and throwing out votes in a Black woman’s stronghold – was blatant voter suppression.
This is the glass cliff we spoke about last month. It’s the pattern where women are elevated into structurally impossible situations and then blamed when those structures break. For Black women, the cliff is steeper and the drop is longer, because the racism embedded in those structures gets to hide inside the sexism, and the sexism gets to hide inside the racism, and both of them get to hide inside a garbage term like “electability.”
Talarico and Crockett were largely aligned on policy. What was different was that Talarico was a white man who read as safe to a party running scared from confrontation, and Crockett was a Black woman who spoke the language of righteous fury and Black voter mobilization. The Democratic Party cannot keep asking Black women to be the margin of victory in every close race and then, when a Black woman wants the room for herself, hand the nomination to someone “less threatening.”
And here is what makes the Democratic response this week so hard to stomach: this is not new terrain for Jasmine Crockett. MAGA has been coming for her since she arrived in Congress, and she has handled it with more grace than any of them deserved. MTG mocked her “fake eyelashes“ on the congressional record in 2024. When Crockett fired back with “bleach blonde, bad built, butch body,” MAGA called her “ghetto.” Not rude, not unprofessional. Ghetto. MTG went on Megyn Kelly in 2025 to suggest Crockett can’t understand Black struggle because she’s educated, as if those two things are mutually exclusive. JD Vance told a Turning Point USA audience that her “street girl persona is about as real as her nails.” When reporters asked if she was distracted by his remarks, Crockett said: “I have been a Black woman my entire life.”
None of that should surprise anyone. It is ugly and it is relentless, and Crockett has been absorbing it for years. She even turned the harassment into a merch line. She kept going.
What should surprise us in 2026 is that, after all of that, after years of MAGA targeting her and a party that kept asking her to show up anyway, the Democratic post-mortem on her Senate race was about her tone. She was dealing with voter suppression, a racist VP, and a congressional colleague using her appearance as a punchline in an official hearing, and her own party responded to her loss by asking whether she was too much. That is not Ken Paxton’s doing. That is ours.
What Happened to Elizabeth Booker Houston
That’s what happened on the ballot. Now let’s talk about what happened behind the scenes.
Elizabeth Booker Houston is an attorney, public health professional, political commentator, and one of the most visible Black women in the progressive creator space, with over a million followers across platforms. She’s the former FDA worker who went viral in 2025 for quitting and posting a photo flipping off portraits of Trump and Vance. She is a vocal defender of Crockett and was a formal organizer of creators around her campaign. If you know Liz, you know she will unapologetically tell you her mind with accuracy, respect, and clarity which is exactly why she’s been targeted and not just by people on the right.
Last week, political influencer Luis Magaña (@RogueDNC) began posting content critical of Crockett on Gaza policy. When Liz pushed back and shared a DM exchange she’d had with him, Magaña responded by photoshopping her image into a racist caricature. We’re not reposting it here. You can look it up if you want.
He eventually issued a non-apology to the internet (not directly to Liz), saying he’d been “educated on the history of racist caricatures” and that she’d been “bullying” him. So, a Black woman who disagreed with him and shared receipts of it was labeled the bully. The NAACP stepped in to distance itself from Magaña, who cited a local CT chapter award as proof he couldn’t possibly hate Black women.
Magaña runs a progressive political account. He would not describe himself as hostile to Black women. And yet: a Black woman defended Jasmine Crockett, pushed back on misogynoir, shared her receipts, and got a racist cartoon of her face in return. This is a learned behavior, and it did not come from Mar-a-Lago.
This was also not the first time Liz had been targeted from the left. In August 2025, journalist Taylor Lorenz published a piece in Wired about the Chorus Creator Incubator Program, a nonprofit that offered progressive creators stipends from $250 to $8,000 a month to help build their platforms and speak freely online. Lorenz reported that Chorus was linked through fiscal sponsorship to the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a 501(c)(4) that doesn’t publicly disclose its donors, and framed this as a “dark money” operation secretly controlling Democratic creators.
The piece specifically named Liz prominently (along with Pari and a number of other hardworking progressive creators), implying she was the paid face of a covert influence operation.
We won’t re-litigate every detail Taylor got wrong. Liz did that herself on Angela Rye’s podcast, walking through her contract point by point. What matters is the targeting: Lorenz had Liz’s direct cell number. She chose to reach out for comment through a buried Instagram DM from an account Liz had unfollowed after previous conflicts between them, then noted in the article that Liz had not responded to a request for comment. If it’s not obvious yet, the way Liz was specifically and repeatedly singled out by Taylor over the past few years has the shape of a targeted campaign, a misogynoir campaign.
Taylor has historically been a left-leaning journalist. She would likely not describe herself as hostile to Black women either. That is exactly the point. Misogynoir from people who consider themselves allies does not come with a disclaimer. It comes with plausible deniability, and it operates in spaces where Black women are supposed to be safe, which makes it harder to name and easier to survive without anyone in the room acknowledging what just happened.
The Takeaway
Jasmine and Liz didn’t experience the same thing. But they are both Black women in public advocacy roles targeted with tools designed to silence Black women specifically - voter suppression, slander, a racist cartoon - with a common goal to silence them.
We expect this from the right. The right has always done this. What last week made clear is that in 2026, with everything Black women are already navigating from MAGA, they are also still having to navigate it from Democrats who debate their electability after voter suppression, from progressive journalists who single them out by name, from left-aligned influencers who respond to disagreement with racism. The same women being asked to save the party are being undermined by it and the same creators building the left’s media infrastructure are being targeted by journalists who cover that infrastructure.
Misogynoir shows up in different ways, but it is most dangerous when the people committing it have convinced themselves they are not capable of it.The common thread here is who it happens to and what it is designed to do: get Black women out of the room, out of the race, out of the conversation. The point is to make the cost of showing up feel higher than the cost of staying home.
The same women being asked to save the party are being undermined by it and the same creators building the left’s media infrastructure are being targeted by journalists who cover that infrastructure.
We are writing this so you understand that cost and help us keep it in check.
The system keeps testing how far Black women are allowed to go. We already know the answer they keep trying to give us. We won’t stand for it.
What You Can Do
Unfollow/Block
RogueDNC
Taylor Lorenz
Do not give these people airtime.
Follow and support Black women (Substacks linked here, but follow their Instagram/TikTok/YouTube too!):
Erika | Black Girls Who Brunch, Abiola Agoro, A.B. Burns-Tucker, Raven Reveals, drjeanius, Alicia Luncheon, Nimay Ndolo, Jasmine Burton, Hope Giselle, Malynda Hale, Renee Bracey Sherman, Joy-Ann Reid, Dasia, Rhythm & Rights, Steph Jacques and of course Elizabeth Booker Houston
Who did we miss? Tag them in the comments!
Find us on Instagram @Women_InAmerica
Perfect, thank you!
It’s hard to imagine the guts it takes to keep showing up and representing when the people who are supposed to be your backers keep pulling the rug out from under you because they can’t get past their deep seated racism. Jasmine could have absolutely won the Senate seat—no white male Dem has been able to do it in decades, so it makes no sense that Talarico is the “safe” bet. And these gross journalists who want to undermine Liz don’t do half the work she does. They just create click-bait for their viewers and readers. I admire how these women put themselves out there and keep doing this work, despite the many extra barriers they face. Thank you for this piece.