Black women have been speaking for years. Maybe now, the rest of America will listen.

They are speaking.

Hear them, America? See them, world? Put down the smartphones and look up for a moment, 55% of my White sisters.

Black women are showing all of us how it's done.

From demonstrations to debates, from press conferences to the polls, Black women — especially Black journalists and public officials with ties to this region and the nation's capital — stood up to make history and to reclaim the nation that has always taken them for granted.

They helped put President-Elect Joe Biden on the road to the White House with 91% of their votes going to him and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, finally putting a woman in power.

And straight up, the honor of First Woman in the White House should go to a Black woman.

The majority of White women aren't interested in elevating their own. When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, only 45% of White women voted for her, while 98% of Black women cast their ballots on the side of making history.

No surprise, really.

Because let's be honest, Black women have been shouldering America's most difficult burdens for centuries.

Even back in 1808, when Thomas Jefferson flounced around acting all noble about passage of the law that prohibited the importation of international enslaved people, he was making life even more hellish for Black women already in America. Without the transatlantic slave trade, the need for Black women to produce the next generation of people enslaved on plantations became even more urgent. And the two plantations that became the nation's most productive human breeding farms were in Maryland and Virginia.

A century later, when suffragists finally secured the women the right to vote in 1920, they left their Black sisters, who fought ahead and alongside them in this battle, in the dust. Black Americans didn't officially secure the right to vote until 50 years later with the 15th Amendment or truly secure it until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The slap in their faces continue to this day, when 55% of White women chose to vote for (soon former) President Donald Trump — an increase since 2016 — preferring a misogynist who paid off the porn star he was cavorting with while his third wife was home with their baby, who regularly berates women's looks, who fends off dozens of sexual assault allegations and talks to us like we're frightened housewives cowering in gated subdivisions.

Nevertheless, for all four years of the Trump administration, Black women have stood up to Trump, no matter what he threw at them in Washington D.C. And it got nasty.

He reserved a special cruelty for the Black women of the White House press corps, calling one "nasty" and a "loser," telling another she asks "a lot of stupid questions" and urging another to stop being "threatening" when she simply did her job and asked a follow-up question.

But CNN's Abby Phillip, a native of Bowie, Md., veteran White House reporter April Ryan, a Baltimore native, and PBS NewsHour reporter and Georgetown University graduate Yamiche Alcindor didn't back down.

Americans were stunned by the toddler-style throw-down of all three White men taking part in the first presidential debate — Trump, Biden and moderator Chris Wallace. But then-Sen. Harris, D-Calif., refused to allow that nonsense during her vice-presidential debate. She shut down her persistently obstreperous opponent with the stern rebuke: "I'm speaking."

It was the same implacable way D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, D, protected her city from an administration that cared little for it.

Bowser stopped Trump from rolling tanks down city streets on the Fourth of July. And though he pulled off a COVID-19 superspreader event on White House grounds — away from D.C.'s regulatory reach on federal land — Bowser's citywide restrictions on large gatherings put the kibosh on a large victory party he was planning at Trump International Hotel on election night (well, she and more than 4 million voters).

Her most powerful clapback, the traffic-safety yellow "BLACK LIVES MATTER" painted on the street leading to the White House during May's racial justice protests, is so yuuuuge, it can seen by satellites. Cities across the nation — from tiny Cambridge, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, to Dallas to Los Angeles — followed with similar bold messages on their roads and plazas.

And now with Howard University alum Harris making history by breaking the glass ceiling for all women as the first female vice president, Washington will be — more than ever — the epicenter of Black female power.

This election gave the D.C. Council two more Black female members — Janeese Lewis George, D-Ward 4, and Christina Henderson, D-At Large. The adjoining jurisdiction to the east, Prince George's County, has County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, D.

My geographic focus shouldn't mean I ignore Stacey Abrams, the woman who lost her election for governor of Georgia but went right back to work on voter turnout and seems to be on the verge of helping Georgia turn blue.

The celebrations in the city Saturday were wild. On every street corner there were horns blaring and people cheering. I saw a blonde woman pop out of a car sunroof to ring a cowbell and a brunette on the back of a scooter banging pots together. Another White woman — this one with a rainbow hula hoop — twirled around as she sprayed champagne at people gathered in Black Lives Matter Plaza.

But the most honest and truthful celebration I saw, the only one my teenage son pointed out, was by a Black woman dressed in all white, walking straight through the crowd holding a shoebox-size piece of cardboard that simply said: "I'm Speaking."

They spoke, all right. And the rest of America needs to thank them.