Legendary activist Kimberlé Crenshaw on why those white people Zooms give her hope

When word of massive, star-studded Zoom fundraisers for white Kamala Harris supporters spread across the internet, it certainly raised eyebrows. Fundraisers from groups like Win With Black Women and South Asian Women for Harris were perhaps to be expected, since Harris is a biracial Black and South Asian woman. A fundraiser for Win With Black Men was equally intuitive. But fundraisers just for white people? “I believe the scientific term is actually a goop of women,” cracked Jon Stewart on The Daily Show after learning that 100,000 people had attended a fundraiser titled White Women: Answer the Call. “‘White Dudes for Kamala’ Was Even Cornier Than It Sounds” concluded the Cut. The fundraisers were massively successful. White Women: Answer the Call, which featured celebrities like Connie Britton, P!nk, and Megan Rapinoe among its more than 160,000 attendees, raised $11 million for the Harris campaign last week and sent 30,000 volunteers to Women for Harris. White Dudes for Kamala, which saw appearances from Jeff Bridges, Mark Hamill, and Pete Buttigieg, raised $4 million after the call on Monday. “The idea was: How do we use our platform and our privilege to do the same thing Black women and men had done on their calls?” Shannon Watts, the organizer of the call and a prominent gun violence prevention activist, explained in an interview with The Cut. She added, “It was more like a reckoning than a rally.” Still, some onlookers felt conflicted, even contemptuous. Many progressives agree that it’s valuable to treat whiteness as a distinct identity group rather than the default. At the same time, something about a call just for white people could feel disorienting. Why not set up a fundraiser for Harris supporters of all identities? When it comes to thinking about how white feminism intersects with the work of electing a woman of color to office, no one is better positioned to tease out the nuances than legal scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw. Crenshaw is one of the founding scholars of critical race theory, the legal concept that sent conservative minds aflame a few years ago, and she developed the idea of intersectionality, or looking at how multiple modes of oppression can work together. So I called her up to find out what she thought of the Harris fundraisers for white people. Crenshaw spoke to me from Nashville, Tennessee, where the African American Policy Forum, of which she is co-founder and executive director, is holding its fifth annual critical race theory summer school. Together, we talked through how today’s organizers are taking their cues from the triumphs and failures of the civil rights movement, and why those who want to protect democracy should start thinking intersectionally. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. [Media: https://twitter.com/ilyseh/status/1816635077763231761] What was your first reaction when you saw fundraising events like White Dudes for Harris and White Women: Answer the Call beginning to come together? This is really telling us the difference between this candidacy as opposed to the first Black female who ran for President, Shirley Chisholm. I mean, Shirley Chisholm couldn’t get any constituency to support her, including the Congressional Black Caucus. So we’re in a different world. You not only have just Black women — who have the capacity at this point to raise millions — but white women, Black men, white men, and then South Asian people taking this up: It suggests to me that there is a greater awareness than ever before that in order to secure some protection against the further disintegration of our democracy, people have to be willing to organize in their own communities. They have to be willing to address the dynamics that they worry might prevent their community from supporting Kamala Harris’s presidency. In the Black male group, they’re talking about sexism. I mean, that’s a huge moment. In the white women’s group, they’re talking about racism. So yeah, this may be what [legal scholar and civil rights activist] Derrick Bell called interest convergence. There is a converging interest between those of us who think, talk, and write about intersectionality and those who want to save this democracy. They now have to think in intersectional terms. And that means white women thinking about racism, Black men thinking about sexism, white men thinking about both of these things. It is a remarkable moment to see these formations come together and the conversations that they think are important to have. I think a lot of people, when they first saw these events emerge, had the thought of like, “Oh, this is like having a White History Month. White people are so often the default. Why even call out a specific event just for them? Why not have an event open to everyone?” So I’d love to know your thoughts on whether this was an effective choice, and if so, what made it effective. That’s a misreading of the moment, and I think it’s an under-reading of what is different about these efforts to form around categories that many times are not even marked or noticed. Look, plenty of people had a lot of things to say about white women voting for Trump. So what is the solution to that? The solution to that is for white women who are not for Trump to mobilize other white women to talk about it: What is it that people should be thinking and saying that they haven’t been? What is it that they need to do to mobilize that particular political cohort? It is, I think, a not particularly sophisticated response to simply say this is like White History Month. In fact, I think that’s kind of silly. This is acknowledging that race and gender and other factors do form a consistent political axis in our community, and it is important to find ways to speak to those constituencies, and to speak to them in a way that doesn’t affirm the worst aspects of these historical categories. It makes possible for the best mobilizations, the best ways to talk internally, so that we can secure our democracy. We saw the possibilities of raising consciousness, generating excitement, and raising resources so that this excitement has a chance of actually turning into a politically powerful coalition that can put a non-authoritarian in the White House. So would you say that this kind of identity-based fundraising is a good strategy to continue throughout the election cycle or even going forward? Well, one cannot tell what’s going to happen throughout the election, right? So we’re in a period of time where clearly a moribund campaign has excited people. Clearly, depression has turned into excitement. It’s a fluid situation. But let’s be clear about another thing: race, gender, class issues. They’ve been around for the entirety of this country. To think that suddenly they’re going to dissipate at some point, regardless of what happens or even if Kamala Harris gets elected, is a mistake. It was a mistake that too many people made when Obama got elected. And I hope it’s not a mistake that people make again. These are deep grooves in our society, and because most of the time they’ve been used in a negative way, people think that they’re inherently only capable of producing exclusion and power. But there have been plenty of white people who have organized as white people in defense of democracy and defense of racial justice. I mean, the entire civil rights movement, one of its most important conventions is that white people put their bodies on the line as well, knowing that as white people, their ability to mobilize for a true multiracial democracy would gain disproportionate attention from the media. This is using whiteness to dismantle exclusion. And we need to tell more of those stories. The very fact that we’re talking about this is because those stories are not part of the history that we’re taught in schools. Parents attack teaching about our racial past because they say it’s divisive or they say it makes their kids feel bad. It’s evidence that we’re not taught about these people who have organized around their whiteness in order to advance and promote racial inclusion, democracy, and a true multiracial democracy. Correction, August 2, 10 am ET: A previous version of this story misstated the kind of summer program Crenshaw was speaking from. It was a critical race theory summer school.

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Legendary activist Kimberlé Crenshaw on why those white people Zooms give her hope