POV’s “And She Could Be Next” directed by Grace Lee and Marjan Safinia is one of the best miniseries about politicians, race and change that I’ve ever seen. It’s thoughtful and informative and I highly recommend that you watch their work and then, after you process it, recommend it to the people in your world. It’s also an act of powerful, uncompromising activism. To watch, visit www.andshecouldbenext.com/watch or www.pbs.org/pov/watch/shecouldbenext/, where it will be streaming until Aug. 29.
This miniseries works if you are political or not. Either way you will understand it. Those of us who have lived their lives under the proverbial heel of white privilege know that one of the most important elections of our lives is just months away.
What we have learned by the election of the unqualified narcissist currently sitting in the White House and the people he’s chosen to place in government positions (most of which, like him, are also woefully unqualified) is that we can’t afford to sit silently in a corner.
Lee and Safinia’s “And She Could Be Next” makes the urgency crystal clear providing facts and figures that “they” don’t want us to know.
Filmed between 2018 and 2019, the beautifully edited miniseries follows a group of determined women of color as they run for political office on the state, local and national levels. There is a range in age with the youngest of the candidates, Bushra Amiwala, a DePaul undergrad attempting to be elected to the Board of Commissioners, becoming the youngest and first Pakistani Muslim person ever to run for the seat.
“And She Could Be Next” also took us behind-the-scenes into the campaigns of several well-known leaders including Stacey Abrams, running for Georgia governor; Rashida Tlaib, up for Congress from Detroit; El Paso native and border activist Veronica Escobar; Lucy McBath, a gun control advocate and Georgia congressional candidate; and Maria Elena Durazo, a union organizer running for state senate.
Resilience is in abundance in every candidate, and the volunteers working in each of the campaigns are equally as fierce. Politics and politicians have a long history of playing dirty. Stacy Abrams, for example, has faced extreme adversity in her campaign, weathering character assassination that focused on her debt, etc. But it’s great that the filmmakers included these snags because each of the candidates comes with challenges and history. They are all relatable and that’s one of the gems of the miniseries. Relatability on the highest level.
To wit, Lucy McBath’s backstory which (sadly) involves the horrible, senseless and tragic murder (by shooting) of her young son makes her a very compelling, persuasive candidate especially on the issue of gun control. She’s not just a series of well-constructed political points. She has lived inside the hell and is strong enough to stand up and try to make a real change because lives depend on it.
I appreciate Lee and Safinia for providing a quick historical cheat-sheet in the opening sequence reminding us or in some cases telling us about Barbara Jordan, Anita Hill, Dolores Huerta, Patsy Mink, and Shirley Chisholm. All of these women of color, we are reminded, have laid the foundation for electoral coalitions and yet, still, after all that work women of color are not in real positions of power.
The first episode is titled “Building the Movement” and it’s a fast-moving, deeply engaging, personal look at the price of running for office. The second episode is titled “Claiming Power” and it provides insight into how the actual electoral process works (or doesn’t work) focusing on the necessity of voting and registration all the while fighting organized voter suppression, which is what the Abrams campaign faced against her unscrupulous rival candidate—then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp—with his white-privilege focused agenda on manipulating the literal casting of votes.
Lee and Safinia produced a balanced miniseries, especially when they gave voice to the “boots on the ground,” focused grass-roots organizers and volunteers. These people won’t make the newspapers, they are too busy making phone calls and knocking on doors or giving voters rides to the polls. These are the people mixing the proverbial concrete to pour into our collective future. They have faith. They believe that each voter counts and they are willing to help make it happen, forcing state electoral boards to leave polls open so that people waiting in line for three hours can cast ballots. They are fearless warriors.
“And She Could Be Next” is a perfect miniseries, released by POV at the right time. It reminds us, again, that we are just months from one of the biggest elections of our lives where we have the ability and the moral obligation to remove evil.