Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar widely credited as the originator of the term and the concept “intersectionality,” was on Democracy Now (DN) this morning. She came on the show to talk about Kamala Harris, but, really, mostly to promote the ongoing Critical Race Theory Summer School at the African American Policy Institute.
It’s a short interview, and the gist of it is that the current presidential race is marked by racism and misogyny towards Kamala Harris. The show played a clip of Donald Trump dismissing Harris, in his usual style: “She’s sort of incompetent. She’s not very smart, but she’s very radical. Very radical. She will try and defund the police.” We then watch Harris throw a challenge, of sorts, to Trump (who has so far refused to debate her), at a rally: “Well, Donald, I do hope you’ll reconsider to meet me on the debate stage, because as the saying goes, if you got something to say, say it to my face.”
It’s all very girlbossy, and the crowds can be seen cheering wildly.
Back at the show, Goodman asks Crenshaw to respond and the scholar says, “Well, first of all, one has to respond with just applause. I think it was such a perfectly delivered challenge to Donald Trump.” But a challenge to what, besides his reluctance to debate Harris? Crenshaw has nothing to say about the claims that Harris is a radical who wants to defund the police—someone with whom a leftist audience might actually agree. We learn quickly that this is not to be a nuanced conversation about Harris, but a cheerleading session disguised as a pushback against racism and misogyny.
Crenshaw also has nothing at all to say about Harris’s actual policies presumably because, at the time of this writing, there are none, with a little more than ninety days left till election day.
Instead, she keeps harping on supposed threats: “We cannot defend democracy, we cannot defend Kamala Harris, without taking on directly the intersection of racism and sexism that we are seeing playing out across this campaign. And so, the summer school that we’ve been having and that we’re having is designed to provide precisely those tools, the literacy that’s necessary and the courage, frankly, to meet this battle where it actually is.” She continues, “And we’ve got to disarm the War on Woke.” This is more of an advertisement for the AAPI than anything else. The “War on Woke” is a catchy term, but Wokeness is not at the heart of the issues facing voters today, in one of the most fraught and bizarre election years.
When asked by Juan Gonàlez if she had any thoughts on “substantive issues, for instance, that the Harris campaign’s website…does not have a platform or policies on it that explain what her particular policies will be if elected in office,” Crenshaw doubles down on her vagueness, insisting that the “real threat to our democracy that marched through that Capitol was the threat that was symbolised by that Confederate flag. We know that the election is just the first part. The second part is maintaining the mobilisation that put her there.” Again, she simply bypasses the question.
I watch Democracy Now every day because it’s the only leftist television news show out there, and the only one that has not dropped the ball on the ongoing genocide on Gaza. People can and will and should disagree about the views of some of the people who are featured, but that is a topic for another day (and they should also watch and read outlets like Electronic Intifada and Current Affairs for much more coverage of Gaza and related issues). But all of this is to say that it remains, for me, a critical part of my daily news intake—even though I complain about it, often.
Among my ongoing complaints has been that its chief co-host, Amy Goodman, belongs to what I often call the Nice White Ladies Club when it comes to matters like race and sexuality. In this, she’s part of a constellation of women that includes Rebecca Traister and Rebecca Solnit (also guests of the show, unsurprisingly) who are so, so nice about issues like race, even as they hold on to their conviction that Nice White Ladies like them will save the world. The best example of this is a 2016 debate between Kshama Sawant (not on DN often enough) and Traister, about the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Sawant, refusing to be drawn into the question of identity and the importance of a woman president, says, “It’s more the fact that she is a dogged representative of Wall Street and Wall Street interests, and her entire party, the Democratic Party, and the establishment that controls it, is a representative of Wall Street interests.” (These are words that could well apply to Harris today.) In response, Traister offers very little of substance in words, but she pulls the classic Nice White Lady act, noting condescendingly, like a governess praising her charge, “I’m glad that you and her other critics are making these points very, very loudly.” In other words, “Look at you, you adorable little darkie, using your big words!”
When Democracy Now first premiered in 1996, it was a huge change from the mainstream media’s coverage of ongoing wars and politics. Over the years, as with Gaza, it has remained a critical and sometimes oppositional voice but Goodman’s persona, on the show, has never deviated too far from that of the white woman who is to the left of politics on many issues but remains, in her positions vis-a-vis people of colour, a liberal who fetishes the Other for fear of causing offence. She’s never quite able to muster more than, at best, a tremulously deferential attitude towards people of colour. (Examples abound and I’ll have more in a forthcoming analysis.)
As a result, she is either reluctant or unwilling to contest and question women like Crenshaw about Harris, the kind of neoliberal politician of whom DN should be most critical, given her track record on, for instance, the prison industrial complex. On the matter of Harris, she seems bent on focusing on the racism and misogyny, as I noted in my earlier piece, On Cat Ladies and Culture Wars, without asking questions about her policies (invisible so far). Like so many on the left-liberal part of the ideological spectrum, Goodman seems more terrified of upsetting Harris’s chances of a win than of really pushing us all to demand a world of left alternatives.
But even if we simply settle for a tired liberalism, one that at least presents something that Trump does not, voters are not afraid of having to make a choice: they want an actual choice. On Twitter, Astra Taylor, responding to Kamala Harris’s announcement that she would, in essence, double down on the border even more than Trump, tweeted, “This is sad. And ineffective. A 2024 analysis of European electoral/polling data showed that adopting rightwing policies on issues such as immigration and economics isn’t a winning strategy. It makes sense. Why cast a ballot for an imitator when you can vote for the real thing?”
Right wingers will vote for Trump to the exclusion of their economic interests, sure. They aren’t going to care that Harris promises to demonstrate the cruelty she showed when she went to Guatemala and said, with the haughty disdain she would never have shown white people, “Do not come. Do not come.” But are these really the people anyone should be trying to convert? How much of this supposedly rampant sexism and racism is a problem out in the real world, and how much of it is manufactured chaos created by pundits, all over the ideological spectrum, to keep their careers going? Consider, again, I beg you, the silly kerfuffle over Vance’s cat lady comments, one that continues to incite anger and hatred: as I’ve pointed out, he made the comments three years ago, and pissed off large numbers of people even then. Today, in 2024, with—I remind you, again—ninety days to go, is there any point in grasping at that sad little story instead of revealing the many problems with Trump’s policies? Does it do more than bring desperately needed eyeballs to rapidly failing websites?
I’m not denying the force of racism and sexism in the United States. But I’m wary of letting people like Crenshaw show up to tell voters, as she clearly did, that we need to wait till after the election to figure out our piffling economic and political concerns because the big, bad meanies are about to shut down our “democracy.” This is liberal fear-mongering, the kind that got us nowhere in 2016, and it’s Nice White Lady talk, even if it comes from a prominent Black scholar (in truth, many people, including certain kinds of men, can be and are, members of the Nice White Ladies Club). Crenshaw’s biggest claim to fame is her discussion of “intersectionality,” a term that has been misused and misapplied by most people on the right and the left (the level of that misunderstanding is also a topic for another day). But Crenshaw has been feeding off the salience of “intersectionality” since 1989, when she first introduced it, like a one-hit pop star feeding off the royalties from a single song. She hasn’t produced much scholarship that’s startling or new since then, and seems to be more focused on keeping the African American Policy Forum going, and most of that work seems to be about, let’s be blunt, recycling intersectionality and taking advantage of instances of police brutality as they happen. A book on intersectionality has had its publication date pushed back often and is now only due in 2050.
Her DN interview demonstrates the extent to which Crenshaw and her liberal ilk will insist that opposition to Kamala Harris is nothing but racism and misogyny: in this worldview, we are all Trump if we disagree. Trump brought up the idea that Harris might defund the police, but this is a laughable claim since her advocates can easily retort, “Ha, no, she’s a bigger cop than you,” as Lara Bazelon pointed out, in a critical piece in the New York Times. To its credit, DN interviewed Bazelon about Harris’s record. The question is: will it, and other progressive/left media do the same? We do, after all, want radicals who will defund the police. What is left media to do with this conundrum, during a fraught election? Or are we fated to be silenced until November 4?
To be fair to all concerned, it’s early days yet. But, but, but: there are only ninety days left, and if DN, ostensibly on the left, persists in letting people like Crenshaw come on and insist that this election is all about sexism and racism, without once interrogating what Harris’s actual agenda might be, we’re doomed to another Trump presidency. And if the left can’t muster the courage to demand that candidates do more than be “Not Trump,” we can hope for nothing better from liberals and progressives. We see in this kind of conversation a repeat of what we saw in 2016, when Hillary Clinton and her allies insisted, as she did to the New York Times, that she was the only thing standing between voters and the apocalypse. This was and remains insulting to voters everywhere, and is based on the belief that people’s votes depend entirely on their race, gender, and other parts of their identities.
Of course identities matter, and even the left fails miserably on understanding, for instance, how a gendered lack of access to abortion can affect women’s economic choices, or how a racist transportation system that keeps Black and brown communities from easily making it to white neighbourhoods (the situation in Chicago) can affect employment and economic prosperity. But in a large general election, voters have all that and more to be concerned about: they are tired of an ongoing pandemic that continues to make them sick and even kill their loved ones, they are terrified of losing their homes, whether rentals or “owned,” they are actually much angrier about the ongoing genocide in Gaza than most politicians want to acknowledge, healthcare is a farce even on expensive plans, and they feel the pinch every week as they shop for groceries and essentials. These issues are all connected to the identities of people, but “defeat Trump because he’s a racist and sexist” won’t work if the alternatives don’t go beyond, “Hey, look, we’re not racist and sexist!” Voters are complicated and smart people, despite what coastal pundits and influencer-thinkers want us to believe. There are multiple issues that weigh on their minds. They’re not waiting for Critical Race Theory scholars with sharp words and endless op-eds to come and save them.
For more see:
“On Cat Ladies and Culture Wars.”
“On Joe Biden and COVID.”
“Hillary Clinton Needs to Retire.”
“Some Quick Updates and an Introduction.”
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. I make a point of citing people and publications all the time: it’s not that hard to mention me in your work, and to refuse to do so and simply assimilate my work is plagiarism. You don’t have to agree with me to cite me properly; be an ethical grownup, and don’t make excuses for your plagiarism. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.