“I’m always going to be a part of the fight.”

If there was a theme to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ heartbreakingly candid interview last week on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," it would be the above quote. The 2024 Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency solemnly and repeatedly discussed her plans to assist in the effort to save democracy not in elected office, but from outside it.

“For now, I don’t want to go back into the system,” said Harris, explaining that she wants to travel the country talking and listening to the people, with whom she believes the power lies. “It doesn’t mean we give up.”

There it was, in perfectly plain English: a declaration of continuing to battle the current administration’s disastrous erosion of everything this country is supposed to be, but not from inside the government. It’s weird, then, that apparently many Americans listened to that and heard, “I’m retiring to my yacht off the coast of Malta and watching the U.S. burn on my iPhone 25.”

Sigh.

“I’m still trying to understand how Kamala Harris say[s] she is going to *work outside the system* and people heard ‘she is not doing anything,’” activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham wrote on Threads. ”The children were left behind, I fear."

Social media is full of people who believe it’s a constitutional imperative to spout — with authority — every dumb thought that enters their little heads. Sadly, it’s not exactly surprising that so many citizens, who are rightly terrified of the turn the country is taking, saw Harris’ statement as a betrayal.

But I don’t think this is just about wanting a competent person who got close to the White House to do everything in her power to save us. It’s one more example of how Black women, who make up approximately 7.8% of the U.S. population, are expected to throw themselves into the fray to save people who don’t seem to like them. And in this case, the voters seemed not to like Harris. So why are you bothering her?

I’ve written exhaustively about the frustrating state of being the demographic that everyone expects to sacrifice themselves, and why some of us are over it. It’s so head-shakingly predictable that the call has been for Harris or Michelle Obama to do something about this crisis, and not, say, former presidents Joe Biden, George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. (They also keep asking where Barack Obama is, but not his fellow white ex-presidents. Curious.)

Take, for example, the Threads user who posted that the former VP should “pull your big girl panties up and help us fight.”

“Rest when the fight is over, Queen, NOT NOW,” she added.

Girl, stop. I immediately replied that this was incredibly disrespectful to a woman who had jumped into the election only to be rejected — someone whom the current president thinks should be prosecuted because he claims she paid Beyoncé to support her campaign. Big girl panties? Are you for real? Talking to Harris like a servant while condescendingly calling her “Queen” doesn’t help.

The user, to her credit, acknowledged her misstep and admitted she was venting. But see who gets vented about?

Harris isn’t just being judged harshly online. Headlines discussing “107 Days,” her forthcoming memoir about her eventful and abbreviated presidential campaign, have been dismissive and salacious. The New York Times initially wrote “Kamala Harris Sells a Memoir About the 2024 Campaign” as its headline, which kinda sounds like “This Black lady is money-grubbing and selling out America,” before changing it to something less inflammatory (the original is still in Google, though.)

Even Colbert — who I believe is losing his job because of his opinions about the current administration despite his employers at CBS saying otherwise — seemed initially disturbed by Harris’ stance on stepping back from being inside the system. But she stood firm, reminding him that when she conceded the election, “it was important in my speech to tell people to not give up.“

Harris said she is trying to listen to the country and see what they need in a “non-transactional way” and not as someone just trying to earn their vote. When Colbert tried to get her to name who, in her opinion, was the current leader of the Democrats, she declined to specify but maintained it’s not ”on the shoulders of one person. It’s really on all of our shoulders.”

Kamala Harris applied for a job for which she was rejected. It is not her responsibility to try to now do that job anyway. No one is coming to save us.

We have to save ourselves, and Harris is committing to being one of the people along for the fight. That has to be enough.