65. Views from the 92%: Black Women Reflect on the 2024 Election and the Road Ahead

I'm Kimberly Crenshaw, and this is intersectionality matters. The podcast that brings intersectionality to life by exploring the hidden dimensions of today's most pressing issues, from say her name to the war on woke, DEI and CRT and the global rise of fascism. This idea travelogue lifts up the work of leading activists, artists and scholars and helps listeners understand politics, the law, social movements and even their own lives in deeper, more nuanced ways. I'm sure many of you listeners were energized and inspired by the possibility of the first black women president of the United States. So now I give you our vice president, Kamala Harris. To me, vice president Harris stood on the shoulders of our unsung heroes of the past. Black women like Shirley Chism or Barbara Jordan, all of whom believed that there was room in our democracy for the leadership of black women, but in politics, like in so many other public domains, there's still a sturdy glass ceiling. And we knew that those who benefit from that glass ceiling wouldn't stand idly by and watch us shatter it. We also could have predicted that they'd played dirty to keep the status quo. That's exactly what we saw when they seized upon long standing racial tropes, combined with gendered ones, while insisting that anyone pointing out the directionality of their jabs was the real racist. Journalist Brittany Pagnette summed it up well. So let's look at what's been happening to Kamala Harris as an example. She slept her way to the top, that's the black Jezebel trope, right? She's not smart enough, that's the black laziness trope. They're commenting on her looks as if that is what she leads with. And so those attacks are specifically targeted toward black women. We have to name it clearly as Massage Amar, and we have to understand that fighting back against that requires consistency of engagement. That we can't just name it once, we have to name it each and every time it happens and dare people to keep talking about us like that. Leading up to the election, my team released a series of election episodes that aimed to add nuance to what everyone was seeing on TV and hearing on the airwaves about both presidential candidates. If you listened, you'd know that we had hoped the American people would see Vice President Harris for who she is and how she compares to Trump. We uplifted the fact that VP Harris was not a law breaker, but an enforcer, not a failure in all of her ventures, but a success, not a serial flanderer, but a responsible and beloved stepmother, not someone who stole from the working class, but someone who offered policies to protect them. We hoped that the candidate who stood for democracy and progress would prevail. Out those episodes, Kirsten West Savali, K. Wise, Whitehead, and Tim Wise all critiqued the underhanded ways that Vice President Harris was smeared as promiscuous and incompetent. Her intelligence challenged as the results of DEI policies run amuck. And in this episode, the final in our election series, we've widened our circle of guests to get as broad a snapshot as possible about what just happened and where we go next. This post-mortem is critical, especially when we consider the fact that Harris' opposing candidate, heir to a multi-million dollar fortune, was able to evade any accountability for as many crimes and misdemeanors. We watched him amplify the racist and sexist attacks against his opponent. His insults were often played down as him just being off the cuff or speaking his mind or being his authentic self. I think they'll walk all over, she'll be so easy for them, she'll be like a play toy. They look at her and they say we can't believe we got so lucky and I don't want to say as to why, but a lot of people understand it. Arnold Palmer was all mad and I refused to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros they came out of their dish and oh my god. Now imagine if you would, Kamala Harris, having failed in multiple businesses, stiffed her employees twice divorced, imagine if she had conceived children while married to someone else. Maybe one of these things would have disqualified her from the very start. This right here is the operation of race and gender power. This is identity politics on steroids because it's Trump's identity that allowed him to remain viable despite being the least suited candidate for this office in recent memory. We witnessed Trump's uncanny ability to project upon Harris all of his own weaknesses, ignorance, lack of discipline, disdain for others and disregard for democracy. The fact that despite all of this, he was given the most powerful job in the country, maybe even the world, this is the true meaning and danger of preferential treatment. But we know it's even more than that, any one of us who has been passed over for something we clearly deserve understands just what happened. The fact that Harris was the exact opposite of Trump in the things that most mattered to the job and was still effortlessly framed as irrebudably unqualified is simply another grotesque performance of intersectional power and exclusion. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are not taking the same exam. Yeah. And I think it bothers people. They're not taking the same exam. He gets to be lawless, she has to be flawless. We know this story, so at least some of us might have expected that in the aftermath of this debacle, that the stage would finally be set for a sober, urgent reflection on the cost of racism and sexism, not only to those of us who are targeted by it, but to our entire society. To add insult to injury, the torrent of post-election analysis is almost completely sidestep, those most alarming elements of the current political reality. The alarm bells that pundits ring now are not warnings about the onset of fascism paved with misogynoir. Instead, we often hear that it's the Democrats and most specifically black women that are the problem. The ones to be called out, silence, and potentially set aside in the quest for Democrats to regain the driver's seat. Instead of being rewarded for our A level performance, we've effectively been accused of having insinuated ourselves into the political discourse to the collective detriment of the nation. Melanie Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition of Black Civic Participation and convener of the Black Women's Roundtable, reflected on this recently. People who are up for the position for to be the head of the Democratic Party, why don't we see a woman? Why's it not a black woman? If we vote at 92% for the candidate, why aren't we not even seeing one black woman in the running in the discussion? So that's one of the things that I see that we have to address. If the goal of the MAGA right was to return to a period before we had power, before we had a voice, before we had a seat at the table, then the Democratic establishment in their handling of the post-election narrative about black women is doing their work for them. It seems as if many of the minds charged with making sense of the election aren't only missing what's in front of them. They're telling everyone else not to trust their own eyes to make sense of what they saw, and they're even trying to tell this to black women, 92% of whom cast our ballots in favor of democracy. The gulf between what our eyes are telling us and what the mainstream median civil society are preaching to us could not be greater. That's the reason for this episode, the fourth part in our election roundtable series. There is a tumor in the election post-mortem that analysts unskilled at diagnosing the condition of the body politic cannot address. So, in typical fashion, we gotta do it ourselves. To help me with this task, I'm delighted to bring on some of the smartest and most thoughtful black women to pierce through the silence. Not only to consider what this moment could have represented for black women, but also to highlight the consequences of us not being able to foreground an intersectional analysis when we look back to consider what happened. This episode, which is part of AAPF's Under the Black Light series, features Barbara Arnwine, president and founder of the Transformative Justice Coalition, Karen Atiyah, columnist for the Washington Post, and Natasha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund, and the Black Voters Matter Capacity Building Institute. We also had the special pleasure of hearing from Kirsten Westsevali, vice president of content at I-1 Digital. A very special thanks to K Weiss Whitehead and Fran Calhoun for their continued support that evening and throughout the past few months. And if you like what you hear, join us in January for our next Under the Black Light event. So Barbara Arnwine, let me turn to you. The racism that was directed at Vice President Harris was palpable early. They refer to her as being the DEI candidate. What should we make of this being the new term that is used to denigrate Black leadership? Well, thank you so much for having me on the show today. And also, I want to shout out much love to the 92%. And much love to the 74 million people who went out and voted right. Let's talk about this. We know that there was so much whispering going on throughout this entire campaign that was focused on trying to denigrate Black women. This is nothing new, but our need in this moment is to figure out how we deal with it. We don't deal with it by being depressed. We don't deal with it by being discouraged because, frankly, this is also the reason the result of two years of discouragement, money, millions of dollars that poured into Black communities to basically discourage Black voters and to shame Black voters. And I think that we have to talk about all of this, not only about the complicity of the media, as people have been pointing out, but we got to talk about how, indeed, it is critical for Black women not to just talk about our magic and our incredible beauty and intelligence and grace in this world, but we got to talk about how we fight. How we become a fighting formation. How we are able to know that these battles are going to come, that these kinds of things are going to be said, that these kinds of attacks are going to be launched. We got to be prepared for them. We can't act like it's not going to happen. We can't hide, you know, when he said that she wasn't Black and she said, same old playbook, she shouldn't have said I'm proud to be Black. Yes, Darnit, that's who I am. You know, we got to learn to really turn this whole ship around because right now, you know, the Titanic was hit by this white iceberg and we need to make sure that we absolutely are strong. It is, yes, the iceberg is an app analogy. And one of the things, too, that has to be elevated, is the denigration of DEI. Come on, Phil. It's just the new inward. I mean, come on. The ship hits the bridge and the Baltimore Harbor. And they start to about the DEI mayor, Brandon Scott, which had nothing to do with the Darn ship. Nothing to do with this. It sort of flies off a Boeing jet and that's got to be because a DEI mechanic. And once again, it comes down to the things that we haven't effectively been able to integrate into the mainstream. The understanding that DEI is not a signifier, someone less qualified. The operation of diversity, equity and inclusion programs are not preferential treatment. They are efforts to ensure that people who are qualified and would otherwise be excluded have the opportunity are failure to be able to force a reckoning at the media level. And even with some of our allies, is what now leaves this as a loaded weapon on the table that is used against us. So we're going to see DEI being weaponized. We're going to see universities in philanthropy being attacked for having any recognition that the ways that people have access to their institutions need to be broadened and deepened and made more equitable. This is basically the end of Reconstruction 2.0 redemption pushing us out and attacking the policies that have made it possible for us to integrate the institutions to which we've traditionally been excluded. It's a lot of work. I mean, one of the things that we're trying to do here is to list the things that need to be done differently next time. So we need to speak directly to those efforts to deny what our racial identities are in our communities. We need to speak to the efforts to integrate DEI. And we also need to speak to the ways that racism, sexism, individually and together create a completely different arena for us when we are candidates. On that note, let me come to you, Kirsten, because one of the principal ways that Kamala Harris was attacked was she was battered with serious lies about her past, used again to suggest she wasn't qualified, that she quote unquote "slet" her way to the top. Now this is something that is gendered, women often have to deal with it, but it takes on a particularly violent dimension when it comes to black women. A dimension that we might be able to use Moyabaley's term "massage and war" to express. Now you may or may not have heard of massage and war, a fairly new term for an age old experience that most black women know all too well. So it's almost like the double discrimination of being a black and being a woman. And what massage and war really touches on, it's that particular dislike hatred, prejudice and bias against black women. So tell us about how, what we saw happening, what we could have predicted was going to happen with respect to these stereotypes against her, against black women in general. Now this is an expression of massage and war and why we should have been better prepared to deal with it. You know, first before I go into response to your point, I want to just frame this a little bit because why it is important to discuss these things and look at these things is because we cannot look away because we are dealing with the party who also tries to negotiate often times and bargain with white supremacy. Because these are the people they are trying to tell us we should link arms with and get votes from. We cannot negotiate, we cannot bargain with that level of massage and war with that level of white supremacy. We need to be able to call it out when we see it not only from them, but when people within the Democratic Party tell us we need to link arms and capitulate to that level of terrorism. So that to me is the reason why we cannot turn away. And why we cannot be surprised is because the story of this nation has been written, there are no surprises here. They see black women as either mammies or Jezebel, right, like the oppression, systemic oppression in this country is mapped across the bodies of black women. We are a nation root in land theft. We are a nation root in genocide rape and slavery. We talk about police violence and the murders that they commit against our communities, but also sexual violence is the second highest form of police brutality. So when you have someone like a Kamala Harris who they cannot contain, who is not their property, who they cannot tell the shut up, who is becoming the face of a system that they think belongs to them that should help black women stay in a position of subservience to them, they cannot take it. So we have someone like a Donald Trump who I can't tell you how many times in the news he talked about how beautiful she was. They say all the time she's beautiful. He called her like the most beautiful actress he's ever seen. They cannot contain her. And that is a problem. They do not want to see black women in power. One of the things I noticed, again, we're not surprised about how the popular vote turned out. But a little bit looking into how white men in particular in this moment were so angry, they refused to play the game. That's a little bit more than just you're running the mill like a Hillary Clinton or another white man running for office or even a Joe Biden. They cannot stand the fact that this black woman that they cannot sleep with, that they cannot fire, who is more educated, more talented, probably more economically secure than a lot of them. And that's really what it came down to and we saw it all through the very end. There are a lot of reasons why we can say the election turned out the way that she did, but I think one of the things we have to do is make sure we call a thing a thing and talk about the entire story that we saw. And that's exactly what so many of the pundits are unwilling to do, call a thing a thing. So of the list of things that we might want to put on our agenda to address from the past. Here's the way that stereotypes about black women that were created during our enslavement, that were used to justify breeding us. The institutional creation of property was institutionalized rate of black women. What do they need to say about us, believe about us, to make that acceptable, to project upon us, the desire to be bred in that way. These are the stereotypes about black women and our sexuality that have never been widely and culturally refuted. It is still floating in the ether, capable and ready to be used against a candidate for the highest office in the land. And they say that us calling that out is the identity politics, not the fact that this was used against her in almost by the book kind of way. What book are they reading, not to recognize and know what this was all about. So thank you for elevating that and making it clear to us. And let's also recognize that, yes, there was a majority of white women who voted against democracy and against women's interest for a rate this for somebody who is proud to have taken away a right to choose. And what that calls for is the colloquial come get your girl, right? There needs to be conversations among white women about these issues. That is their work in the same way we need to have our own conversations, right? That has to happen now in an urgent way. Sarah, let me come to you one of the most visceral ways that we saw massage and war wielded in this election was when President Trump questioned Harris's racial identity at the NABJ conference where you were not only were you there. You were very much in the news cycle because you step down as one of the chairs of the convention over their decision to invite Trump in the first place. So we had a moment over the summer in which we had another event like this and we talked about why you chose to do that. But now looking back at that moment after the election, what he did with that opportunity that was given to him seems even more consequential. So we saw this disinformation spread. And some black people themselves with my racial children fell victim to this lie. I'm now queuing up Janet Jackson, for example. Janet Jackson just did a wide ranging interview with British newspaper The Guardian. But most of the focus is on when she was asked her thoughts on VP Kamala Harris, possibly become the first black female president. She answered by saying that she had heard that Harris's father was white, which we all know is false. So take us back to that moment when he said that what was the reaction to Trump being allowed to spew this lie not only at a black person but at a black woman and not only in a black woman, but in a black space. He was able to come and do that in our house. So what was the significance of that looking back, the condition of possibility, and now what people are saying about it, seeing what its longer term consequence was? Thank you all for having me, greetings from Acra Gana. And this is actually a perfect question to sort of talk about the black identity, global identity, immigrant identity, the attack that was launched at NDBJ. For my part, my decision to step down was mostly because I knew not just as a journalist, but as somebody who cared about my community and that conference being a community of it, I knew that there was nothing but harm that was going to come from that. So looking back on that now, not just disrespecting NDBJ, but all of the journalists on that stage were black women and there was no hesitation in denigrating the black journalists on stage. And being in the room, even though I stepped down, it was a viscerally painful experience for many of us to see just the utter disrespect and the violence. And not only that, but that happening in exchange for something that I personally would consider the return being a very low journalistic value. And there was so much focus on the racism and the attacks that afterwards asked anybody, do we learn anything about black voters, do we learn anything about black communities? Was black press, even as I'm talking about historically, black pasts in Chicago, I'd be Wells, Ebony, Jet, to come not just into NDBJ's house, but into Chicago's house and pull that. That is cellular level. I could not put my name to it. All that being said, looking back on that now, it wasn't just the attacks on Harris. It was a targeted attack on very divisive issues within the black community. And I think they knew what they were doing. They knew what they were doing by questioning her blackness and her Caribbean identity. It touches on trigger points about immigrants, first generations, quote, unquote, cause playing as black. Right. To me, it felt like there was a thorough line between that attack on who gets to define blackness. Why should Trump even be able to define blackness? There was a thorough line between that and the attacks that we saw on Haitians and eating pets and all of that. And I think, to an extent, yes, the racism was expected. I think not expected, but, you know, we still have to stomach it. I think the reaction from white liberals to the racism wasn't, and it still hasn't been one of not only acknowledging, but fighting back, being allies, instead, the responses, at least that I personally got for stepping down from white allies or people who were white buters, was, well, yeah, okay, yeah, sure. He was racist and he destroyed your conference, but we needed to see that. We needed to see how racist he was. And I was like at the expense of our dignity. And that's what I think pulled the veil back for me, is our trauma and the disintegration of our communities worth white people having to be reminded of who Trump is over and over again. And at a certain point, I'm like, you're not trying to be educated. You want to spectacle. So I think it highlights the lack of, I'm one of the very, very few opinion columnists who is able, institutionally able and given the space to be able to call things for what they are. And so, we have a lot of work to be done in terms of even being able to have people in the spaces, have black women in the media spaces to call the thing and to speak up. You know, I have to say that when he did it, I was insulted and appalled and angry that he was given the platform to do it. But it wasn't until I started hearing from people, some who themselves are right ratio, I might say, who accepted the idea that somehow she was not black. So on one level, I was surprised how his team had more information, more usable information about the splintering of our community around some of these things than even, I thought it was silly, but insulting. I didn't think it was going to work to the extent it did until I started hearing young people who were getting this stuff on social media and actually were believing it, which actually brings me to something Latasha that you said, here we have the racism of interrogating someone else's racial identity. But I want to talk about the sexism that's inherent in this because while there were some attempts to stir up some distance between Barack Obama and the black community, it really didn't have staying power, it really didn't stick. You know, people weren't saying I'm not voting for Barack Obama because he's not black. That didn't have the gravitas that this seems to have. And we've had generations of biracial black people seen as fully part of the black community because we've internalized, we've accepted the one drop of blood rule. So what do we make of the fact that this had more traction against a woman, a biracial woman? What is the sexism in that? So I think there's a number of things. The first thing, let me say, is even where we get our information from, we cannot underestimate the power of social media and how it has framed people in many ways as avatars. You either have the perfect life or you're completely worthless, right? And so we now put people in these boxes and we now use people in this space almost as their avatar. So let's just start with that. That's a different kind of expansion, I think of information that we saw from Obama's campaign. But then the second thing that I think is important to your point, right? Racism is designed in such a way to make you question your humanity, but sexism is really a power move. It is to establish that the males are to establish that they have power over a woman, over their agency. And when you put those combined those two things together, I think that that explains what she experienced. And so I want you to understand Trump and see Trump as an abusive man. And what do abusers do? Abusers isolate. They seek to try to isolate the woman. They want to isolate her from anybody. That's what he tempted to do. I'm going to isolate her. I'm going to otherizer. I'm going to make her be something else, I'm a dehumanizer. The second thing they do is they literally try to take away your power. That an abuser wants to take away the power of agency. You don't have the agency. You can't define yourself. You don't have the agency to name yourself, to claim yourself, or say who you are. And so that is a strategy of an abuser. It wasn't by accident that when he questioned that, he went into a space, into a black space. Because what do abusers do? They literally want to separate whoever is the subject of their abuse. They want to separate it from the community that in fact protects them. So I think we have to really recognize that in that context. Now, I also want to say that we've got a flip too. She cannot also accept this idea that because she was a woman and she was black, that that in fact was a scarlet letter for her. In fact, part of the reason why he attacked it because it was a super power as well. He recognized that the gender that wild on one hand, he would weaponize gender and race that he also recognized that gender and race were the same things that for millions of people made her attractive and gave her a space of opening of bridging another space. And I'm saying that because I think it's important for us not to continue the narrative that who she was was in fact a scarlet letter on her because of the way that he used it because he understood that in this culture, that what we've seen is we've always seen mediocre right man when they are fearful because mind you, when she entered the race, he was scared to death. Have we forgotten that? Sure we are. He was terrified. Right? He didn't want to talk to her. He was upset. He was going on like Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe. So in fact, her race and her gender really terrified him. And why? Because I think black women, he knows that black women are uniquely positioned in this space because we've experienced racism and sexism. We can navigate that thing like nobody else. And what she did, and she demonstrated that, when in the debate, he never would debate her again because she wore him out. Even the Republican commentators are like, ah, so she wore him out. And so all he had to do is to come for her, just like an abuser, because insecurities made him go back to the playbook of what a male abuser would do when they're attacking a female woman. And this, the fact that that was effective, is the evidence that the identity politics of patriarchy actually played a role in this campaign. She was clearly, I mean, she wiped the floor with him. She wiped the floor with him, and everyone knows it, everyone agreed to it. But yet, the inability to point to that, to say, here is an example of a black woman who was clearly more qualified, clearly superior, and yet she still lost to him. The inability to call a thing a thing is something that all of us know we've seen this happen in our own lives and the fact that the folks in our cave are unwilling to call it is a further dimension of the depression that we're facing, because we know if you're looking at that and y'all can't call that what it is. We also have an attachment to white supremacy, and we literally center ourselves as some of our thinking and our thoughts, literally our shape. I can talk to somebody, Kimela, I can talk to somebody for five minutes and I can tell you what network they listen to. I can probably even tell you what newspapers they read or if they read, I can tell you what network they listen to. And so I'm saying that because I think part of what we've got to do in terms of going to the next level, is really we've got to get people, we've got to capture the hearts of minds and imaginations of people and get people to think outside to be critical thinkers, because what Trump did wasn't surprising to me. The two things that were most disappointing to me is that in a room full of journalists, a black journalist, he should not have been able to complete. He should have ran him off that stage, it should have been complete disruption, right? You can never allow in a space in your space, somebody come in my household for Christmas and Thanksgiving to cut up, you can put out. He should have been immediately, and then the second thing is that mainstream media, that here's this woman sitting down on an interview in mainstream media, had to be questioned by a white woman on a question that she knew was not legitimate legitimizes the question. And so even mainstream media was not called down in the way that it should have been. All he needed was for it to get out in the ethers to take shape. And we should have shut that down immediately, and we should have called those networks out and those journalists that gave any errors, kind of like having embers, a ember fire, and you blow oxygen on it, it makes the fire greater. Which is exactly what the mainstream media did again and again and again. Here's another ironic double standard, right, that revealed half Donald Trump was the biggest beneficiary of identity based preferential treatment in terms of his media coverage. So no matter what the outrage, nothing he did would stick to him. He was like a Teflon coated pan, unlike Kamala, who was rendered by the media like a static clean repository, anything would stick to her over and over again. It's hard to imagine anybody other than a wealthy white male claiming he could shoot someone in broad daylight and get away with it and then prove to us that this is in fact virtually true. He can start a riot that can lead to the deaths of police officers. He can be convicted of 34 felonies. He can enjoy the status of not being sentenced indefinitely. Can you imagine if a black man or a woman had tried to foment a deadly riot and walk away from it? Scott free. So here's identity politics on steroids, yet identity politics on the other side is clearly practice executed and obscured from view by various media cloaking devices. This is a Teflon shield made up of white maleness in action. What is identity politics? So I want to thank all the panelists for helping us unpack sexism, racism, and misogyny law, how they played a role. And we have to ask why is it that these dimensions have been so insignificant in the post-election analysis of what happened and also what are some of the downstream consequences of that. So let's get to these last two rounds and let's keep it moving and we're going to keep these responses to about a minute, a minute and a half. I'm going to come back to you, Barbara. You raised the alarm once again about the role that voter suppression tactics to express disinformation would play in this election. And so we know a little bit about this from 2016 when it was revealed that Trump had used Cambridge Analytica to target 3.5 million black Americans with ads on Facebook that were designed to dampen their enthusiasm and reduce their participation. And one of those ads included a black woman saying she wouldn't vote for Hillary because of her super predatory marks, which Clinton had repeatedly apologized for. This is versus Trump who hoped to see the Central Park five executed and he's never back down from that, right? Now even recent revelations about 2024 show that groups affiliated with Elon Musk orchestrated a $45 million misdirection campaign also aimed at various demographics, including African Americans and some of those ads promoted ideas about Kamala's bold progressive agenda to conservative leaning people. And while others got other kinds of messages that suggested that these were Harris ads, when in fact, they were misdirected claims that were made by pro-Trump people to dissuade people from voting for her. So this is industrial scale lying to buy an election yet. We're not seeing much of that in the post election conversation. So what is the legacy that this misdirection is part of? And what's the consequences of not being able to bring it forward to analyze what happened and what we need to do? I'll tell you, I think about Susan Smith and Charles Stewart, the two people who did something heinous and blame black people for it. It feels to me that this is kind of what's happening with our pundits. The billionaires have bought an election through lies and misdirection, and our people are blaming us for it. Absolutely. And what I want to point out that I want everybody to know is back in 2023, in April, I started warning people about this massive multi-million dollar campaign that was targeting black youth in particular. It was basically saying no reparations, no vote, no George Floyd Act, no vote. All of these really negative things, basically designed to discourage black people from voting. And I said, listen, somebody's got to do something about this. People are just not paying any attention to this. And people never did, you know, really angered me because I don't have the money by myself. But I was working with young folks and they were here in the same thing, they were in nobody want to listen. White political domination is our enemy. White political domination isn't owned just by the Republican Party, it's also owned by the Democratic Party. What we do to break that grip, to make people listen to us, to give us the leadership that we deserve to have, that's more than symbolic leadership. I mean, actual decision making leadership is critical in this moment. I just want everybody to understand that. That until we make sure that we are controlling, you know, how money is spent, where is spent. I mean, come on, I'm really pissed off. I'm not going to deny it about all the, we don't need to put money into the black community because they're just going to vote naturally. All that nonsense that was flowing around so that groups like myself had to go into debt to do what we had to do to help get the vote out. I mean, listen, it is time for us to really have not only internal conversations but real changes. There's some problems that are just deep, not just the historic problems, but there are operational problems that we have to overcome. You know, a lot of the money that we raised didn't wind up in the black community. Let's just be clear about this. A lot of money was raised and it didn't all wind up in organizations that had the capacity to get the vote out. So while we're talking about all of these, you know, it was this, it was that and not talking about the infrastructure. Once again, it's a child's story kind of thing. We're not talking about what we did. We're talking about what y'all didn't do and not being honest about it. So let me come back to Karen to talk a little bit as the sole black woman op ed writer in the Washington Post. So one thing that stood out is that in the face of all of that, the Washington Post's decision not to endorse the first black woman presidential candidate symbolized at least neutrality with respect to the misogyn wire and the incompetence that we saw. Let's remember the post endorsed Obama, the first black man who won Hillary Clinton, the first woman. So now we have a black woman running against Trump. And having endorsed his opponents two times in the past, they flinched. So much like Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, we now see billionaires using their influence to effectively disable the fourth estate as you wrote recently. The way democracy dies in darkness is if journalism is left to die in cowardice. So I want to combine two questions to you. First of all, how do you assess the damage that was done not only to Harris's campaign, but to democracy? And then more importantly, what do we need to know now about the makeup of the media? Who's in it and more importantly, where are we in it? So we have a sense of where we need to fight in the future. What do I say without getting fined out of it? You know, obviously, as I wrote in my op-ed and as I joined my colleagues in a letter that we published with other columnists, the decision to effectively block the planned endorsement for Harris came as a media strike. And as I said on Twitter, it was a betrayal and a stab in the back for many of us in the course of our jobs who put our reputations and our, frankly, our safety in our lives sometimes on the line to be able to stand up to the authoritarians. And so, understandably, with the outrage, and I've seen it in the comments that this does not lead to trust in the media, right? The flip side of this, and it is an uncomfortable truth, is that when people own the paper, they frankly can do what they want, right? I think Elon Musk and Twitter laid bare the realities of raw power and oligarchy in our society. And there's been a reason why, for the longest time, from William Randolph Hearst to the big oligarchs, it's always been thus. It's just laid bare in real time for a lot of people. So what does that mean? In a city that is for so long been a majority black city. Washington D.C. It is hard for me to see how the black community, the resonance of Washington D.C., we would never forget this, right? That being said, anybody who's read my work knows that I've been critical of Harrison Gaza, particularly, I was critical of feeling like black women's faces were being used to sort of mask and justify a horrendous situation with Palestinians. But that being said, it is hard to shake. It is feeling that if Biden were still in the race, that endorsement would have gone through. So as far as the media goes, I mean, I think the media is quote unquote, the media is in turn. I think even myself, as I'm speaking to you all now, I'm trying to figure out what this means for me, what this means for what the strategy is, trying to move against these obstacles. And the fact that legacy media is at its lowest point in diversity since the 1990s. We are regressing and there are a lot of people who are deciding black women, women of color who are deciding to exit the industry right now. So I think where that can pose an opportunity perhaps is, of course, independent journalists. The concept of trust is so important right now. And for those of us who hopefully, hopefully have spent the last eight to ten years calling the thing that being building up social capital, all of that integrity and trust in individual journalists has never been more important right now, even when our institutions fail. That being said, I'm staying at the post, I think that we still have a role to play. I think that I still have a role to play in holding truth and power to account. But that being said, I do know we have to move differently and present information in a different way. I think that what is also happening, and this is tied back to any BJ a little bit, again, for those who don't know the theme of the NABJ conference that Trump spoke at was actually supposed to be about misinformation and disinformation. I've argued that racism is one of the oldest forms of misinformation and disinformation there is. The fact that the rights has targeted misinformation and disinformation research specifically means also that we're needing not just journalists, but researchers in the misinformation disinformation space, in the communication network space, in the media criticism space, like I'm just hoping that when we're thinking about the fights in terms of the media and in terms of shaping people's frankly realities and their information environments that we're also thinking about supporting the research, particularly black women who've been raising the alarm about social media and disinformation and white supremacist networks, in terms of punditry. It's not just about politics, it's about the punditry about how our social media has been shaped, has been enabling abuse, has been silencing voices on Twitter. My voice definitely has been suppressed on Twitter. So I think we are having to just really deeply rethink those of us who are in the space of interpreting the world and information and speaking, how do we move differently? And I'm so glad that you have no plans of leaving the post because it's the only thing that keeps me looking at the op-ed page, thinking every now and then, I'm going to get a window into a truth that I can recognize. And I think too many of us need to know that there's still that voice. So thank you for the work that you do and thank you for carrying that weight because I know it can't be easy. And I also want to uplift the fact that, as you said, we're looking at a less diverse media sphere than we had 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and the same thing is happening everywhere. This is happening when diversity is now under attack. So we are talking about an effort to push us out of every meaningful institution that allows us to name our reality in order to transform it. That's what the attack on 1619 was about on intersectionality, critical race theory, black history. So if you take away the very idea that we have a right to be there, then you take away our ability to actually protect the space that we have to be in these institutions. So this is all part of the same struggle. Kirsten, I want to come to you for your final thoughts and I want to direct the question to black media, which has also always been a vital resource for us. And it's all the more urgent because we know the integration of black women comes not just from white media, but also it is traditionally come, unfortunately, from within our own community as well. So what conditions with black media need to be addressed if we're going to defend ourselves from the misogyny car that was so consequential in this election? You know, Kim, it's such a black media has a responsibility, a legacy, and a tradition that we come from, right? And I always say there is a difference between talking about black people and politics and the politics of black power. And one thing I always say at I want digital urban one, TV one is that we have a responsibility not to allow white supremacy to shape the stories that we tell. We understand that black people can perpetuate white supremacy. We understand that. We do ourselves a disservice when we take the framing that mainstream media gives us and respond to it as opposed to creating stories and crafting stories with nuance and truth. That's what IWB Wells did. Yes. That's what we are called to do in this moment. Yes. And so I also want to be clear that when I'm talking about politics, I don't just mean the Republican Party. I'm always, always talking about Democrats as well. White supremacy is a party pressure. I'm from Mississippi. So I'm very clear that we don't raise Fannie Lou Hamer's name in vain. We don't talk with Fannie Lou Hamer then carry water for the Democratic Party. Fannie Lou Hamer disrupted the Democratic Party. So those kind of stories, when we talk about black women and spaces, it's not just that we're just talking about how can we uplift and how can we speak back against Republicans and black media is doing black people a grave disservice, grave, grave disservice. So in this moment, it is our responsibility to, again, tell the truth about this nation and the ways that we know it has been written. I said earlier, we were having our podcast run election series. The story has been written. MLK said, be true to what you said on paper, but in so many ways, this country is true to what it says and what it said on paper. The black holes are still there. You know, they talk about Nazis. However, we need to talk about homegrown undiluted white supremacy that's right here. Nazi studied us. Nazi study white people here. Those are the stories that black media need to tell. We cannot just pop up and do it when we're scared of Republicans in office because then who is going to trust us if they see the same violence coming from the Democratic Party? The same lies come from the Democratic Party, but we don't say it then because that's now where our add dollars come from. That is doing our people a disservice. We can't just be guard dollars and talk about white supremacy when we're talking about Trump because this country may Donald Trump. So when we're talking about white supremacy about our neighbors, are we talking about the white women who smile on our face like Malcolm X said the Fox versus the wolf? They're both bearing their teeth. Are we talking about them? Are we talking about the fact that we don't care about your blue bracelets? We don't care about your pink puts cat hats. We don't care about any of that. We don't need you in our circles. Are you talking to your aunt, your neighbor, your grandmother? Are those stories being talked about because we don't need you here if you're not saying anything to those people? Let's talk about those stories as well. So in this moment, what I'm telling my team, what I am looking for in the stories that we publish is making sure that we're not just beholden to party politics and we're talking about the politics and the safety and the lived experiences of black people because revolutionary black love is what gets us through not electoral politics in and of itself. Voting is a tactic, not the end all. When my grandmother in 1959, my grandfather paid her poll tax to vote. She was one of the few black women in the state who could vote before the voting rights act. It was white women who threw rocks at her because they didn't want her registering black women to vote. It was people like Elizabeth Katie stand and Suzy B. Anthony who said, "Forget black people voting." So we cannot it is our responsibility even when the Democratic Party ignores black people and ignores, you know, working class black people and listens and pays them to this narrative of just the white working class, black media has a responsibility to bring all black people to the table. Because we're going to compromise and talk and strategize with anybody needs to be among ourselves. We know that. And I'll just end with this. Out of all this, what comes of it is that we cannot, we cannot continue to try to negotiate with the white supremacy that never compromises. And that's in our businesses, that's in our politics, and that's in our media. Nothing but a word as always, Kirsten. Thank you. Thank you for that. And your comments lead straight to Latasha. You know, Latasha, on this, there's 92%. So look, in the business world, you would expect the most loyal customers of a business would be treated right and rewarded by having their opinions valued. Make sure that they feel seen, that they're catered to, that they're secure when they show up. Oh, thank you so, it's so good to see you. So when we think about politics and the fact that black voters, black women in particular have been the backbone of the Democratic Party for a number of decades, we just don't see the same thing. We don't see us being seen as a base that has to be listened to, taken care of, that can develop the ranks of the leadership. We don't see trust coming in our way. So when we look at this as a microcosm of a larger, you know, set of dynamics that have been in place for a while now, what is it telling us that we need to be doing? What is it telling us about the infrastructures that are necessary to defend our interests and to defend democracy and what can we do to support black leadership, black women leadership moving forward? You know, a couple of things I want to just highlight, one, I want to highlight black women and black people. I really believe that black people, black women in particular, are one of the most sophisticated astute voters in this country. We are real clear that this ain't our system. We are real clear about what we're working with. And as Kiersten said, we're very clear about that. I also want to lift up that while we're talking about in terms of the parties, we know that we see racism on both fronts, but I also want us to be careful about creating false equivalencies because they're not the same. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are not the same. Part of reason why they're not the same is because they are some sisters that are even within the party structure that part of do we think that Kamala Harris got on top of the ticket because the white folks in the Democratic Party, 100 at the top of the ticket? No. Ultimately, there were black women who were in positions within the party outside the party on the ground that also did work to make sure things happen. And so I'm raising that for a couple of reasons. Number one, I think we have to recognize this isn't about consumerism, this is about pure raw power. It ain't even about participation. Oftentimes when we're talking about black voters, we're talking to them about this idea around you participating, this ain't about participating. This is really about power. This is about raw power. And so at the end of the day, what we have to do, we have no choice. But every single lever in this country that literally is something is making decisions about us and our communities, we have no choice but to find ways to one, to engage it, two, to replace it. If we need to replace it, three, or radically reimagine and create something completely different. So in this moment, I'm hoping that we take this opportunity as an opportunity to step back and organize ourselves as my sister Curtis said earlier, that we've got to really figure out how we concentrate our power, that you had a billion dollars going to a campaign. There are so many black groups that literally it's not just a message. You can put millions and millions of dollars on TV, but many of the folks when I talk to my niece, she doesn't even look at TV, network TV, she gets some news from TikTok. So you don't just need the message, it's important that you have credible messages. And oftentimes what we've not seen is we've not seen that kind of investment. I think this is a moment for us to really think about how we're investing in organizations and the intellectual enterprise of black women and sisters, we don't have to hold some of that back. That instead of literally giving that to institutions that don't value us, that extract our ideas, that extract our energy, that we've got to figure out how we think of ourselves, not just as citizens of this nation, but how do we think of ourselves as founders and mothers of a new nation, that the nation that we desire we deserve, what Trump is doing is what has been done for 400 years. The good thing about being a black woman, we've navigated through that, we've survived that. But at this moment, we've literally got to rethink and really radically reimagine what is it going to be for the next, because racism and sexism are not my birthright. What a word, what a word we have no choice but to engage it, to replace it or to radically reimagine it. Well, that's clearly what this conversation has been about. It is just the beginning of a new set of conversations in this new moment in which we need them. Now, I have a final word from Barbara Arnewein, who Barbara, today is Shirley Chisholm's 100th birthday, well, a few days ago, and her legacy imagines a different politics for us. Anyway, there's an emerging narrative that the Democrats have got to change their agenda and their rhetoric to win again. And this is all because of a little bit more than a one percentage point difference. Right. Angela Harris and Donald Trump, they want to throw away too much of what makes this party the party it has been. So this isn't a new argument, Barbara. This is one that led the Republicans back when they were party to support us, to abandon us in redemption and to leave us at the mercy of white power for a century. So Barbara, as we leave each other, tell us what we need to know and what we need to do to channel the fight for the multiple ways that we need to protect our interests moving forward, both in our party and outside of it. I just want to say a couple things really quickly. We've heard some great ideas. We will continue obviously to have more of these forums where we can continue this because we're just scratching the top of the surface of this banner. There's so much else for us to go deep into. Think about it. We're out of six million people who voted for Biden and did not show up to this election. What happened? There's questions that we got to answer and that we need to be on top of and those weren't just black folks. We need to figure out what happened. We know that a whole lot of people came out to do the anti-heroic vote. We got that. We know what happened with that split voting and all that meant nonsense. We'll talk about that in the future. But let's talk about what we should be doing right now. I want to give a shout-out to every single black woman who got out there and organized. Think about it. One of the biggest voter registration new registrants were black women voters, young black women voters, give them some love folks, lift them up, give them nothing but hugs and sweethearts because they were phenomenal. They made all the difference. First campaign started off with only 120 days. Somebody else been running for four years. Come on folks. The fact that she came this close is amazing. And I just want us to understand the power of what we do. Don't forget, you know, not every victory is bearing key to us, but not every quote losses that defeat. We have the ability to keep on pushing. We are not going to stop. If people thought this is going to discourage us, make us go away, make us stop. No. I'm looking for who else wear those other sisters we could rise up. So power to what we did and elected, you know, not all those new black women to Congress, including good black women senators. Come on folks. Let's talk about our power, our energy, our amazingness. You know, I think that when we hear folks talking about what's going on this video, guess what I'm saying? We need black women media consortiums. We need more of those. Let's think about how we really turn this around. Yes, we need a list of every door and company we ought to be boycotting because they're turning their backs on us by abandoning DER program. We need to invest in our young folks. Let's put nothing but love and energy into them. Let's defeat this dismantle D-E-I-A, that's in the Congress right now. And let's all call 202-224-3121. Folks, we need to take our wisdom, our energy, our genius. Because we as black women, as black people, as this entire nation, we didn't come this far just by fake. We came this far also because of the genius of black women. Don't ever forget that, don't ever, ever as long as you will forget that. And when we look around us, you know, go deep into your soul and in that soul, give some hugs to the spirit of a Harriet Tubman, give hugs to the spirit of an Ida B. Wells. Lift up a Kelly House. Yeah, if you don't know about Kelly House, look her up, C-A-L-L-I-E House. And know that story of that fabulous, amazing sister who fought for reparations ended up being jailed because of her battle back in the early 1900s. Come on folks, black women been out here on this battlefield. We don't turn our backs. We know that it's because of our energy, our vision, our brilliance, our incredible energy that we get things done. Don't forget, you know, a whole tight to Fanny Lou Hamer's dream. Don't forget to be there for a million Boyton's vision as she was not senseless on the Pettus Bridge. And we're coming to that 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, this coming year in 2025 in the voting rights act. Don't forget Shirley Chisel, as we've started off talking about today. Folks, hold tight to our fight. You do hear me? Hold tight to our fight. Don't ever go back this. We only know for us that is who we are. We are not going anywhere. We're not disappearing. We are on this battlefield until we win because this battle is for future generations. It's for everything. And so everyone needs to know throughout this world globally that when it comes to power, they need to reckon with us. Thank you so much, Pam. Thank you so much to everybody. My sisters, we are the future. Thank you, Barbara Arnway. Well, y'all know that's why we call her the Closer. She pulled it all together and makes us even more excited than we were when we came in here. Thank you, everyone, for being a part of such a dynamic and wonderful conversation. This episode of Intersectionality Matters was produced by senior producer Nicole Edwards. Research and scripting from the team at the African American Policy Forum, mixing by Sean Dunham. To support our show, subscribe, leave a review, and follow us on social media with the handle Intersectionality Matters. I'm your host, Kimberly Crenshaw. We'll be back soon.