"Insulting Black Women": Kimberlé Crenshaw on the Racist, Sexist GOP Campaign Against Kamala Harris
An exclusive Q&A interview with one of the co-founders of Critical Race Theory.
If she wins in November, Kamala Harris will become the first woman president, the first Asian president, and the second Black president of the United States. Hers is a history-making candidacy in more ways than one.
Republicans have reacted, perhaps predictably, with bigotry and rage, smearing Harris as the “DEI candidate.” And these racist and sexist attacks on the vice president will only escalate as we approach voting day. So who better to discuss Harris’ historic candidacy with than the legendary scholar of race and racism in America, Kimberlé Crenshaw? She is a professor of law at UCLA, executive director of the African-American Policy Forum, and perhaps best-known as one of the co-founders of Critical Race Theory.
Read our exclusive interview with Prof. Crenshaw below.
ZETEO: How do you feel about a Black woman running for president? She could be just a few short months away from the Oval Office. Do you have to pinch yourself?
Kimberlé Crenshaw: This is an unprecedented and important moment full of possibility. But it also promises to generate a profound backlash that will test the capacity of Democrats and others to respond effectively. Undeniably, Harris’ candidacy is a history-making moment built on the pathbreaking leadership of the unsung heroines of the past – Black women such as Shirley Chisholm, Fannie Lou Hamer, Barbara Jordan, and so many others who believed that there was room in our democracy for the leadership of Black women. That she will be the first presidential candidate of South Asian descent, the first graduate of an HBCU [historically Black college and university], and the first woman of African descent to head the ticket of a major American party has rightly excited multiple communities and stakeholders, myself among them.
Yet, I am mindful that in every way that her unlikely candidacy mobilizes us, it also creates an equal and opposite reaction among the MAGA base, a reaction that the current embargo against critical thinking about our past and our present has ill-prepared us to meet. Harris will become the perfect avatar for all that aggrieves those who fear the browning of America more than they fear the collapse of democracy and the rise of fascism. The perceived loss of status among white voters and male voters has long been a factor in American politics that the right has weaponized, and the left has avoided and sometimes even enabled. And it is perhaps the most under-addressed dynamic in the media’s game-like coverage of American politics. Consider how far-right fears of white replacement drove the January 6 insurrection: The fact that it was the votes of Black and brown people in places like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Phoenix that grounded claims of a stolen election has been dreadfully under-addressed in accessing the driving forces that brought us to the brink. To a sizable constituency in America, Obama’s presidency embodied that fear and now Harris’ candidacy will present an even greater threat to their sense of the established order. These hostile sentiments will be catered to, activated, and accelerated by Trump, Vance, and their surrogates across the nation. Political violence beyond [what] we’ve seen for over a century is not out of the question.
“Harris will become the perfect avatar for all that aggrieves those who fear the browning of America more than they fear the collapse of democracy and the rise of fascism.”
My worry at this point is that the Democrats and others concerned about our democracy may be underprepared to meet this battle head-on. The instinct to disengage, sidestep, or otherwise “rise above” racism, sexism, and xenophobia has become a baseline sensibility in post-2020 America. The language and tools needed to address the particular ways that Harris, as a woman of color, will be framed have themselves been captured and rebranded in the right-wing disinformation campaign against “wokeness.” Thus, while stores of ammunition against Harris have been forged by anti-Black racism, deep wells of sexism, and anti-immigrant nationalisms, she sits at the intersection of all of these dynamics while the countervailing tools have been relinquished by individuals and institutions who have been disciplined into silence by the war against woke. If we are unable to name these dynamics — either because the terms have been co-opted and distorted or more generally because the media and others have fallen prey to the same prejudices — the MAGA strategy stands a fair chance of succeeding. The so-called war against woke is like a loaded gun that has been left lying on the table, ready to be fired against Harris and anyone who strikes the MAGA juggernaut as out of place and out of time. It is our job to pick up this weapon and disarm it.
ZETEO: We all know that representation in and of itself isn't enough to tackle structural racism and social inequities. What do you make of Harris' politics and what she might do in office?
Kimberlé Crenshaw: Obviously, the mere presence of a woman of color at the top of the federal government will not magically wash away structural race and gender inequalities. But it does increase the chance that someone with a personal understanding of those forces would be setting the national agenda, and that’s not nothing. As with President Obama, activists and advocates will have to remain vigilant and push President Harris to make progress on those issues like the widespread police violence against Black Americans, Black maternal healthcare, the much-needed reform of our justice system, and the fight for truly equitable public education which acknowledges our racial past. This is vital because we know that the Democratic Party so often sacrifices issues of racial justice in favor of others that “poll better” with white voters. Their tepid response to the war on woke is one of the reasons why lambasting Harris as a “DEI candidate” has been a go-to strategy of the MAGA bunch. A President Harris — having weathered this storm — would be starting out with a baseline of understanding that is galaxies ahead of most any president in American history, and surely more so than her opponent.
ZETEO: More white women voted for Trump than for Hillary Clinton in 2016, so will white women vote for a Black woman come November?