Wendi S. Williams is the 2026 president of the American Psychological Association, and she is not describing Black women’s exhaustion as a mood. She is describing it as a response to something happening to them in public.
“I think that we are living through a simultaneous reckoning of the devaluation of Black women,” Williams said. “People are at their edge, and understandably so.”
Williams, who is also provost and senior vice president at Fielding Graduate University, ran for the presidency on the slogan Radically Well Together, and her diagnosis is structural rather than personal. “When you normalize a dehumanization response or treatment of people, then it gives it a permission structure,” she said, and that structure, she said, turns nihilistic.
The polling around her says the edge is widely felt. About 37 percent of Black Americans doubt or do not believe that state and local governments will run fair elections, against about 27 percent of white Americans, according to a Marist Poll in March 2026. In a Gallup and Kettering Foundation survey of 23,683 adults, half of respondents worried their own ballot would not be counted, and more than three in four Black adults said they were concerned about peaceful protesters being harmed by federal agents, the military or police.
What Williams proposes is small and deliberate. Vote, she said, “for the care of each other.” She added one line for the women who have decided it changes nothing: “It is not a waste.”
