PBS’s ‘And She Could Be Next’ Spotlights Women Of Color In Politics

It’s fitting, and fortunate for PBS, that And She Could Be Next, a new documentary premiering Monday on the public broadcaster’s POV, focuses on the women of color reshaping American politics. It’s a subject that should interest a lot of people right now.

Weeks before PBS acquired the doc, Joe Biden pledged to name a female running mate. The nationwide protests against racial injustice that started just over a month later only made the documentary seem more relevant.

Of course, directors Grace Lee (American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs) and Marjan Safinia (Seeds) didn’t know all this would converge when they set out to answer the question of whether society’s most marginalized group, women of color, can help preserve and even strengthen democracy in a country that’s increasingly divided politically.

They shot the film, which will air as a miniseries (POV’s first) on Monday and Tuesday, in 2018 and 2019 with a creative team composed entirely of WOC. Next focuses not just on politicians but also on the organizers behind the scenes, whose role in affecting change is often overlooked.

“None of these women would get elected if there wasn’t a vast network of women supporting them,” notes Lee. “All these women candidates are rooted in community organizing and activism.”

Indeed, several politicians who have captured the national spotlight, including Rashida Tlaib, Lucy McBath and Stacey Abrams, are profiled. But so are organizers such as Nse Ufot, the head of Abrams’ The New Georgia Project. Without one, Lee emphasizes, you wouldn’t have the other, and the interplay of their stories is a fascinating aspect of this documentary, part of PBS’s year-long celebration of passage of the 19^th amendment giving women the right to vote.

Initially, Ufot was wary of being a part of the documentary. “They called, and I ignored them,” she laughs. She was too busy running the voter registration program to enfranchise the historically disenfranchised in Georgia, focused on getting voters of color signed up to vote. “I told them, ‘You don’t want me, you want Stacey,’ who was running for Georgia governor at the time.” Ufot changed her mind after speaking more with the directors and learning about their aims.

“They demonstrated this commitment to telling this rich and nuanced story about women’s political leadership, particularly about women of color, in the aftermath of Trump’s election, and I began to trust them, trust their intentions,” she says.

The directors of the documentary, which is executive produced by Ava DuVernay, also wanted to convey the importance of state-level and local elections. While national elections tend to dominate the news cycles, says Lee, “those at the local and state level are making the decisions that affect us most and make the difference in our lives.”

One of those state-level elections, when Abrams lost to Republican Brian Kemp in the 2018 gubernatorial race, left the biggest impression on Safinia. She remembers stories rolling in about voter suppression on election night. “I live in California and became a U.S. citizen in 2016. I had never really seen the forces of voter suppression nakedly at play. It took my breath away—it was an astounding thing to witness.”

She hopes the film will “reinspire civic engagement” while also acknowledging “that many, many people feel completely disengaged by the process. They feel unseen and unrecognized for the value of their lives. Democracy works when we all participate, but a government has to see us and reflect on the problems we have in our lives.”