Why It’s Different This Time with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister

August 8, 2024

Amanda Doyle:

Pod Squad. Today we have the Super Bowl of what is happening in the world. And you should know that my sister just did a deep breath exercise with me 45 seconds ago so that I wouldn’t embarrass her when introducing these two, because they truly are… There is nobody that we could have in this moment wiser and keener and more prepared to help us understand this moment than these two.

We have today Brittney Cooper, who is a professor of gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University, and obviously the author of The New York Times bestseller Eloquent Rage, an absolutely stunning book. Rebecca Traister is obviously writer-at-large for New York Magazine and the author of New York Times bestsellers All the Single Ladies and Good and Mad, as well as the award-winning Big Girls Don’t Cry, about gender, race, and class in the ’28 elections.

Brittney and Rebecca, thank you for everything and thank you for being here with us for this hour. We’re very grateful.

Rebecca Traister:

Thanks for having us.

Brittney Cooper:

So glad to be here, yes.

Amanda Doyle:

So let’s just jump in. So Brittney, in your recent article in The Cut, you said you actually didn’t think Kamala was the right candidate in 2020 and even got slammed by the KHive for saying so.

Brittney Cooper:

Yes.

Amanda Doyle:

So has your opinion about Kamala’s candidacy changed, and if so, what’s changed it for you?

Brittney Cooper:

Yeah, listen. I’m I guess in the KHive now. We’re all KHive now. What I was saying to Rebecca before we started recording was, so our friend and editor at The Cut asked us to get together and talk about the election a few weeks ago. And we were both like, I mean, “Kamala would be better, but do we really think as a country that we could see it for Kamala?” So what I think happened is that me and Rebecca got together and did what we do and conjured some shit, and here we are.

Amanda Doyle:

Yes.

Glennon Doyle:

I know. So be very careful what you say because apparently what you say happens.

Brittney Cooper:

Correct. I was like, not me being a prophetess. Who knew that this was possible? So I think a couple of things have happened. I think that Kamala has had four years to really learn the job. I think that she was always better on issues of race, gender, et cetera, than Joe Biden. She was always more to the left of him, a more progressive candidate than he was. Now, weirdly, there’s an opportunity for all of that to come forward. I appreciate the campaigns to debunk this sort of idea that she was locking up all these Black men in California. I never bought the Kamala top cop line. I never thought that was fair. It always struck me as extremely sexist, and I thought that so much of her wanting to prosecute the case against Donald Trump didn’t allow her to actually shine at the level of policy.

The other thing I’ll say more obviously, is 2020, there’s also a way that Stacey Abrams was a candidate on the national scene at that time, and I’m a total Stacey Abrams fan. So she really represented the horizon of possibility for me in a way that Kamala just did not, and things have shifted. I’m still a Stacey Abrams fan, but what I can see is that Kamala represents so much more possibility for multiracial democracy, both in her personal story, in her commitments. She’s become quite the orator, and I really think that she’s trying to hold down whatever is progressive about the Democratic Party in this moment. She is trying to be representative of that or at least a pathway and a conduit to that, and I appreciate that.

Rebecca Traister:

I want to add to something that I don’t think, and I don’t know, Brittney, if you would agree with this or not. But I think we cannot take out the wild circumstances that get us to this moment. And it’s something I’ve actually talked about with Errin Haines, who’s a friend and a journalist who’s been covering Kamala a lot too. We have these long, centuries-long questions, in this country. Can we elect a woman? Can we elect a Black woman? We have to remember, just because we elected Barack Obama did not fix pretty much anything. But that question loomed throughout that entire candidacy. I think that there is a way in which, especially in political and electoral politics, and I have written before. I actually wrote in 2019 a piece against certainty. I have been obsessed with this idea of uncertainty for a long time and how allergic, especially people with degrees of privilege and insulation, are to the notion of uncertainty.

This plays out in a million ways. It played out around COVID, it played out around all kinds of things. But just in the realm of electoral politics, I wrote in 2019, when I was watching that very dynamic primary, I actually thought the 2019 primary had so many exciting people in it, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, right? These were all candidates who from various angles were presenting ideas and visions of what leadership could look like that was unlike anything the country had seen before in a variety of ways. You could pick apart all the ways, the things about them that was familiar and what was unfamiliar. But they were all sort of like, “Could we do this” questions?

It was a period of enormous peril in which a lot of people, including the people who make decisions around politics in Washington DC, notably a consultant class, pollsters, pundits, all people with degrees of power, who were feeling very frightened because the Trump administration was a terribly frightening reality to live through, that people hadn’t been well enough prepared for before they failed to vote in 2016. So they were searching for something that felt safe. And when we imagine what this country could be if we made it better, that is not a safe callback. Because it’s not something we’ve seen before.

One of the structural advantages, right wing, which is built around white capitalist patriarchy has, is that it is ultimately a nostalgia project. Now, nevermind that they actually don’t have anything to do with originalists and they’re tearing apart the very foundations of the good principles around the founding of this republic and that-

Glennon Doyle:

Selective nostalgia.

Rebecca Traister:

Right, it’s selective nostalgia. What they are calling back to is a cultural and political set of norms in which a certain kind of people had power and that those pictures can feel familiar. It’s right there in “Make America Great Again.” It is right there, that we are looking back to a Norman Rockwell painting of a certain kind of set of straight, white, capitalist, nuclear family, corporate privileged comfort. It can be cast as a comfort even though what it is a callback to punitive inequality. Whereas the left project, which is theoretically and at its best about creating a better and more equal society, in which people are participating who have not previously participated equally before, that is still fundamentally a fantasy. It is imaginary. We cannot put it on a hat and paint a picture of it. And it’s been one of the roadblocks of those who are really committed to that project. How do you make people feel like, “We can promise this” when we’ve never seen it, we’ve never achieved it.

So then if it feels unstable because you can’t picture it, all that clouds in are the things that could go wrong. And we know many things could go wrong, because we’ve been built around the things that go wrong here and resistance to that project. So all of this is to say that in a typical presidential primary, where the power of those people who are so allergic to uncertainty… and we all are, right? We all want to feel safe. And there was a thing that started actually probably not coincidentally during the Obama runs with this obsession with Nate Silver and the polls and, “Keep calm and trust Nate Silver” and all that sort of stuff, where we wanted to look to numbers to tell us that everything was going to be okay.

That was what I was mad about in 2019, is I was like, there’s never going to be numbers that are going to tell us, that are going to offer a promise that we have a certain victory here. And the numbers in fact shield us from having to do the work and put our hearts out there on the line and knock doors and walk the streets and tell our friends and have uncomfortable conversations and do all this labor and really hope for something and realize that we might get our hearts absolutely crushed and our country crushed, because we are fundamentally taking a risk. So we didn’t want to do that. And in 2020 what happened is that we coalesced around the guy who looked familiar and like power has looked the past, because it felt safe and it felt secure, right?

Now, I believe that had we had a traditional primary period here, all those same impulses might well have come into play, and we might have wound up with somebody who was like Gavin Newsom or a candidate who could feel like, we’ve done this before so we could do it again, so we feel a little more certain, we feel a little more secure. It did not play out that way, which is giving us this extraordinary opportunity, where we have this candidate, the frisson, the energy of, this is scary. This is scary. Actually, we haven’t done this before. We’ve never done anything like this before.

In fact, we do its opposite all the time. But it turns out that that is providing a kind of energy and a kind of imaginative possibility and the space for hope and a space for optimism that we can surprise ourselves, and it’s a compressed amount of time. And it’s all of these unusual circumstances that are creating this thing that could not be manufactured in a Beltway lab, could not be manufactured by a political press that is used to doing horse race politics. And I think that’s really crucial to what’s happening here. We cannot hold it up on other kinds of scales of things we’ve done before, and that that’s actually one of the best things about it right now.

Glennon Doyle:

Isn’t that amazing? It’s like only this, only this moment, only these circumstances is the only time that we get a Kamala Harris run. And isn’t it interesting that the way that white supremacy and patriarchy and our society works is that the way we get the unknown excitement, “Holy shit, we never thought we’d get this,” is if it comes with the explanation that, “Don’t worry, she gets all the white dudes’ money, and don’t worry, we have to go with her because she’s the safest bet because we can’t do anything else.” That’s the explanation we have to tell the Dems. If we go with someone else, which, don’t worry, we would if we had the time, it screws us. So you understand that we have to go with her and also she gets the money, so we’re safe. So you put that package together, and then the rest of us get to say… It’s like this spring that we were too afraid to hope for, and then we get to have it. And that’s why people are like [sound effect 00:11:12].

Brittney Cooper:

No, it’s true. And I am thinking of this as this moment of Black feminist based on faith. I’m writing this book and I’m talking about the fact that we need faith for all kinds of secular projects. Faith isn’t just a religious project, right? Faith is the distance between what we believe is possible and what we can prove is possible. We’ve already proven that we can be a rolling dumpster fire who sends our democracy literally to the edge of oblivion. We haven’t yet proven that we can pull it back, but we’re going to prove that now. And the thing that is going to help us to get there is this notion of faith and hope. But those are concepts that really come out of Black politics, whether you think about it in the religious sense of Dr. King and all of the civil rights luminaries, or you think about all of this organizing.

So for instance, I have been thinking so much about what it means that everybody has been on an identity phone call. You cannot manufacture the serendipity of Joe Biden doing this and dropping out of this race on the day, on a Sunday afternoon when Black women have been meeting as a group called Win with Black Women for four years every Sunday. I was on those calls in August of 2020 when they started meeting to try to pressure the Biden ticket to pick Kamala Harris as the VP. And I have been on those calls many, many Sundays in the last four years, watching them raise money for down ballot races. And if you knew the list of Black women who have come through those phone calls, very famous Black women. Any Black woman running for office over the last four years in local, state and national races has come through those calls, and they have raised money to help support those candidates.

So here you have this group of Black women just not so quietly, quietly building a base of power. And then Joe Biden decides that he wants to drop out. That happens on a Sunday. And what do Black women know how to do on a Sunday? Have church. We can have political church, we can have secular church, we can have, Let’s Save Democracy Church. We can do any version of it that you want, and that’s what happens on Sunday night. So all of this excitement rallies, all of these Black women show up, and they begin to say, “She’s the one. We can do it.” And literally, in the space of about five hours, my whole demeanor about this thing shifts. Because I was knocked out, taking a very good Sunday nap when Joe Biden dropped out of this race, and I woke up to my phone being, my text messages being crazy.

Then I was like, “Well, I have to get on the call tonight.” It was like my anchor point. And since then we have seen all of these groups, we’ve seen South Asian women, we’ve seen queer folks, we’ve seen Black queer folks, we’ve seen white dudes, we’ve seen white women all have their calls around supporting Kamala. And we can’t forget that the ability for folks to see and claim identity is rooted in decades of organizing that comes out of Black feminist thought.

Amanda Doyle:

That’s right.

Brittney Cooper:

We are the people that invented the term intersectionality and said, “Your identities matter. Your race and your gender shapes how you experience politics, how you experience power, how you experience your daily life.” And it is Black women who have been yelling and screaming online and at protests since 2016 about the way that white women failed us, that gave white women their marching orders and their mandate for this moment.

So when we talk about how this happens, it looks magical right now. It looks like serendipity. But the thing we all know about feminist movement buildings is that the flashes in movements are rooted in the fact that somewhere along the way, people are holding it down. You have white women like Rebecca, who I only call a friend because she is one of the few white women that I trust, and I trust her because she has been doing the writing to help white women see themselves in their positionality more clearly in the democracy for decades at this point, right? That kind of organizing shifts what is possible.

So you have all of those things coming together. You have the technological tools, you have the energy, you have just enough desperation, and you also have people with access to language and frameworks to think very quickly about how to organize themselves. And so Black women’s genius isn’t just that we showed up and had a magical woo-woo prayer call. It is that we had been trying to strategize and hack and think about how power works for a really long time in multiple registrants, both in traditional party politics and also outside of party politics in movement building. And you get this really nice synergy of those things right now, and it’s very exciting.

Rebecca Traister:

You’re getting to something else that I’ve been thinking about in this moment, because I’ve been trying to track the good feeling about this. Like, God, I can’t remember when there’s been… The last time I remember honestly was 2008 when there was just this sort of good feeling, and we can talk about what’s resonant and what’s not, about that comparison. But one of the lessons that I’ve gotten, and again, Brittney and I have talked about this a lot in recent years. One of the things I have learned in my work by studying and reading about the history of social movements in this country, which have been driven by, invented by, pioneered by, very often, Black women and is the sort of ceaselessness of them, which is very different from what you see in a lot of white organizing spaces, which, yes, have existed in many forms over the years, but movements of people who really have been at the margins of power tend to be ceaseless in a way that I’ve been obsessing about for years.

I think, for example, and we’ve talked about this, because of the overturn of Roe, one of the critiques that I have come to is that there was a sense, and I think this is actually true in a lot of the mid-20th century social movements, that the victories achieved in the second half of the 20th century around civil rights, around reproductive rights, around gay rights, were somehow permanent. And I don’t know if this is a generational thing, a baby boom thing, the sense that we fixed things and it was done, right? And my most direct experience with that is with the second wave feminist movement and the sense that things were done. And it’s one of the great errors both in movement politics and in democratic electoral politics, that there was not the sense that that fight could never let up.

There was a sort of satisfaction and then a paralysis that followed. And it did not actually take from the history of actual long-term organizing, which is that you never cease the fight. And that that applies in two really distinct ways, both of which have been on view around Roe and Dobbs. A, you do not stop after you win. You do not say, “Well, that’s finished,” and you also cannot stop after you lose. That’s something Brittney and I have talked a lot about recently, is one of the great lessons for me of this time is that those on the left organizing, who have not spent their entire lives in a marginalized position being part of coalitions to make the world better, one of the greatest lessons for them is, we have to learn how to win better and we have to learn how to lose better. Okay, great.

So that is exactly what Brittney is talking about, is that there are coalitions that are in place. And by the way, I will say something in defense of, some of the lessons learned post-2016 from Black women that white women began to absorb through the very contentious and difficult organizing around the Women’s March and then through the organizing around the 2018 house races, then through conversations around Me Too, which is a little different from a political or even social movement thing, but that were very much about meeting and sharing experiences, talking, building bonds between women who were not previously activated in this way, and then certainly in the activism and the political and electoral activism you’ve seen post-Dobbs and around the protests around Kavanaugh. So that was a losing fight, but you saw people coming together around it.

This has been happening since 2016 also in white women’s spaces in complicated and difficult ways, and I think one of the things I’m seeing amongst many of my colleagues in political journalism is a kind of a perplexity, like, “Where did this come from and what are these affinity group calls?” And I’m like, “Oh, no, no, no, no. This is coming from the organizing spaces.” And by the way, the organizing spaces that political journalists have underestimated even in the short term of these post-Trump years, the enormous underestimation of the Women’s March and what it was going to produce, what it was going to be, and then what was going to come out of it, the underestimation of the historic number of candidates who ran and won in 2018, the underestimation of the impact of Me Too and what that was going to mean.

Again, I think there’s a perplexity amongst those who are used to covering traditional horse race electoral politics about the vibes right now, which are coming, I believe, at least for now, this presidential campaign, are coming from organizing spaces and a movement culture, not a polling and punditry culture. And I think that’s one of the really fascinating things we’re seeing happening around us.

Glennon Doyle:

You were talking about constancy and being there every minute of every day and losing and continuing to play after you lose and continuing to play after you win. Brittney, I’ve heard you say, suggesting that it might be true even after you win to work even harder, because as you said, after Barack Obama won the presidency, you said, “They’re going to make us pay for this. They’re going to make us pay.” And I’m wondering, they’re certainly going to make us pay for even having a Black woman at the top of the presidential ticket. When she wins, they’re going to make us pay a hell of a lot more.

But as people who have studied, spent your whole lives studying and immersed in politics and race and feminism, with the lens of being able to really critically see things that those of us who haven’t spent our lives that way don’t see, what do we need to tune into now? What is going to be said? What are the attacks going to be, as Brittney Packnett Cunningham says, “White supremacy is not creative.” There’s going to be nothing creative under the sun, but what are the things we’re seeing?

Brittney Cooper:

Yeah. Listen, the most spectacular and devastating thing we’re seeing is that a cop blasted and killed Sonya Massey, blasted her in the face and killed her literally in the same moment that we see Kamala running for the presidency. And that harkens back to Barack Obama in his second term and Trayvon Martin in ways that are just devastating. When Barack Obama comes out in 2012 and says, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin,” and then you take that picture of Trayvon and you put him up next to Barack, and they look eerily like they could be kinfolks, right? He looks like him. He looks like a baby boy version of Barack. So then you begin to realize that the challenge of Barack Obama’s second term was that the country…

Rebecca said this thing about, “We win and then we stop” or, “We lose and then we stop.” Because we are in a country that has believed in the myth of the end of history. So after the fall of the Soviet Union and the coming down the Berlin Wall, you had historians talking about, “This is the end of history. The American Democratic project has taken root around the world.” And so the 21st century has been whiplash and backlash about the fact that there are no permanent victories.

I would say that Black Americans had their version of this, which is that Barack wins in 2008, and this becomes this next moment when America is like, “Okay, now we’re at the end of history. We have achieved the possibility of multiracial democracy.” And you saw people using the language of being post-race. So then what happened? You get a spate of Black boys just being unceremoniously, not only killed by police and vigilantes, but also getting away with it. That was the hard part. It was that they did it and the legal system couldn’t do anything, and the Black president sitting there running the free world couldn’t protect Black boys in Ferguson, Missouri or in Sanford, Florida.

So you’ve seen Kamala Harris call Sonya Massey’s family, and here’s the thing that’s really important. And I said this to Rebecca, she and I have talked about this a lot. I told her when it looked like Hillary Clinton was going to win in 2016, that white women needed to get ready, because white men were going to be more violent with white women if Hillary Clinton won the presidency. Because the way that patriarchy and white supremacy respond to progress is with violence. And just the inch she didn’t win, and look at how terrible white men have been to white women, even though she didn’t win. They took away abortion rights, right? They’re trying to take away no-fault divorce. They are trying to turn all white women into trad wives, right? They’re taking away contraception. They’re trying to force white women back into their place as a response to what Hillary Clinton meant, and they’re going to do a version of this to Black women.

So we’re going to just see more overt forms of brute violence, particularly with the police. We’re also going to see violence, we’re seeing it now with the way that they’re signaling the toppling of DEI, because so many of the folks who do DEI work in corporations are Black women, Black folks, Black queer people. So them coming after DEI is them coming after the structures of power. Black women have been in major DEI positions in major corporations around the country for several years, and particularly after 2020. These guys don’t want that. So that’s one place they’re fighting, that we actually need folks in these Fortune 500 companies to fight back against, they’re going to come for Black women in the academy.

Chris Rufo didn’t just attack Claudine Gay and get her dethroned from Harvard. Chris Rufo has been attacking me and my platform for many years. In this moment, where we’re calling Trump weird and we’re calling JD Vance weird, why haven’t we used oppo research and attacked Chris Rufo and come back for him and dethrone this white boy? He’s mediocre. He’s not that smart. His only real strategy here is to come after prominent Black women. He should be a target that white women have in their scope. He’s a dangerous dude. He specifically comes after and tries to endanger Black women.

So you’re going to see them continuing to try to de-platform Black women in multiple ways, and you’re also going to see them do everything they can to continue to come after programs that benefit Black women disproportionately. So welfare, child tax credit, anything that makes Black women’s day-to-day realities better, they’re going to do. Bill Clinton did it, right? In the nineties, part of how we got the term “Sister Souljah moment” is that when Bill Clinton wanted to curry favor, even as he was running as a Democrat, he attacked Sister Souljah for basically doing what we’re doing today, which is saying anti-Black racism is a problem and it’s not helped just by us all voting democratic. And then he was the president that presided over the decimation of the welfare state through welfare reform.

Democracy and Democrats can often get into power and then treat Black communities terribly, and the people that they come after the most are Black women and they disfranchise them. They disfranchise their ability to vote. They make life harder through the way that they won’t address real bread and butter issues. So I think we’re just going to see a full court press of a rollout of bad stereotypes again, demonizing Black women as being sexually immoral, as being not good mothers, and then criminalizing them for not being good mothers in all of these local places. So I think we’re just going to see an increase in those kinds of attacks and a limiting of our ability to actually do anything. Because I think that it’s going to happen in small local places in the same way that the uprisings around the 2020 election were hard, because it was like trying to beat back election insurrections in multiple locales, not just at the Capitol building on January 6th. So I think Black women are in for a time.

The one bit of hope I have about that is, but that’s also how we’re always treated, though. We’re always disrespected day to day just in the workplace. We’re always devalued, always undermined. When I said on my Threads account the other day that white women… So I said a thing to white women. I said to them, “It’s not just enough for you to be a good soldier in the voting booth. How do you treat the Black women that you work with?” Because everyone thinks that they’re down for Barack and Kamala, but then you still undermine, backbite, micromanage, mistreat, and otherwise don’t support the Black woman that works in your office space, either because you undermine her leadership because you resent her, or you just don’t think she’s very good, so you compete with her, or you don’t back her up in the meeting or you whisper off to the side to her, “That was terrible what happened to you,” but you don’t say anything in the moment to the people who are being terrible to her.

So I think that we will also see that if white women don’t do their emotional work around a Black woman getting to the presidency before them, that they might take out their anxiety and their resentment around that on the Black women that are more proximate to them.

Amanda Doyle:

Rebecca, do you have anything to add to that about what you expect to see?

Rebecca Traister:

One, I want to say, I feel like I want to jump off three different points that she just made, but one I want to go back to. She said that the conversation that we had in 2016. We were on the phone on a summer day in 2016. Brittney said to me, “White women have got to watch out because there’s going to be violence. There’s going to be violence directed at white women.” I have to say that it’s not that I was exactly dubious, but I do, in my analysis, I had come to understand the various degrees of protection that white women get within a white patriarchy. I wasn’t dubious. I didn’t doubt her, but I didn’t feel that. Sure.

Literally the next day, literally the day after Brittney and I had that conversation, it was not in the United States, but Jo Cox was killed in England, an MP. It was the summer of the Brexit vote, and Jo Cox was murdered in her garden. You’re looking a year later, Heather Heyer’s killed. You look at the treatment of Christine Blasey Ford. They’re the individual examples of these white women, women who do come into these conversations with degrees of privilege and insulation, who were nonetheless just, I mean, violent like… Heather Heyer was murdered, Jo Cox was murdered. Christine Blasey Ford was thrown under the bus in horrific ways. That is in addition to the policy shifts that you have been seeing around obviously abortion, contraceptive access, around the cultural conversations that relate actually to a book I wrote, my second book, which was about unmarried women. And I wrote about this last summer, this incredible cultural push, and make no mistake, being directed at white women in a very old American way about, get married-

Glennon Doyle:

You mean cat ladies?

Rebecca Traister:

Have more babies.

Glennon Doyle:

You’re talking about cat ladies right now?

Rebecca Traister:

I’m talking about cat ladies, right.

Glennon Doyle:

Okay. Just wanted to really be sure.

Rebecca Traister:

And I think that we do need to unpack a lot of the racial stuff around cat ladies, which hasn’t been done. Because, let me tell you, JD Vance is talking about white women. He’s not saying that out loud, and it goes back to Teddy Roosevelt’s speeches about race suicide in the early 20th century. This is a very old American discourse. I wrote a lot about it in All the Single Ladies. It is so relevant. And it’s before JD Vance really. Last summer, there was this enormous push. You saw books from Brad Wilcox, Melissa Kearney, suggesting that marriage is key to happiness, to children’s welfare and stability, all this stuff.

I wrote a piece about it at that point. That is an incredibly punishing set of messages and directives that had been embraced by every columnist, not every columnist, but New York Times columnists, as just good sense, without any acknowledgement about what that means to actual human beings who live in the actual world and have actual relationships, feelings, needs, ambitions, desires, preferences. None of that just gets erased by this marriage discourse, which was very, very, very much in play in the past couple years, and now is hitting a kind of apotheosis with JD Vance or whatever.

Glennon Doyle:

Not to mention that it’s just factually inaccurate, that women in marriages are less happy. It’s men comparatively, to single or in marriage, they are happier, but women are not.

Rebecca Traister:

Right. Right. No, there’s a whole-

Glennon Doyle:

There’s also that piece.

Rebecca Traister:

There’s literally books to be written about this. I wrote one of them, it’s a while now. But yes, you can pick it apart from every angle, and there are people doing really, really good work on this, but that’s another symptom of this. Again, it is this project to move people back into assigned spaces with lines around them. And those spaces, even if they’re not articulating that those spaces are supposed to be divided by race and gender and fundamentally by class, that is a big part of the project.

So yes, I cannot say enough. And there is a lot of reason to feel anxiety about the level of punishment and retribution that is going to come from this moment, but this is something Brittney and I talked about when we were, several weeks before this campaign actually started. These are real questions. Does the fear of knowing the kind of backlash that’s going to come stop us from making the move to begin with? These are real deep philosophical questions. I don’t know.

Brittney Cooper:

Well, it’s not like not making the move protects us. They do it regardless. They’re taking away our rights regardless. We’re in a stance where the only choice we have is to fight or lay down and die. There is no capitulation. That is the mistake that white women have made forever. They just kept saying, “If we just cozy up to them, if we just stick close to them, if we just whatever, then they won’t treat us bad and we’ll have access to the privilege and the money.”

Rebecca Traister:

Which is, incidentally, you can see that replicated in political and electoral terms in a lot of ways. I would argue that’s a mistake that Barack Obama made politically with his opposition, which was the belief that if you have this violent oppression coming toward you, this punitive desire to end your power, and that if you’re just nice to them, if you just compromise, if you just nominate Merrick Garland, a guy nobody could object to, then they’ll play nice. And that was a strategic error. Had Barack Obama nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson for that Supreme Court seat, we would perhaps be in a different universe at this point.

Certainly something I’ve written about, how Democrats have failed to talk about abortion for all these years. Talk about, again, the behavior that stems from thinking that you fix something in a permanent way, when all of American history would suggest that no fix like that is going to be permanent, and that this battle is going to be ongoing through generations beyond us. And yet Democrats did not behave like this was something to fight vociferously for, and in fact, backed into a kind of apologetic corner as if we were sort of sad and worried about abortion, rather than saying, “Look, this is a cornerstone of healthcare and healthcare access.”

Rather than doing that, there was this language of choice that was simultaneously euphemistic but only about abortion and failed to take a reproductive justice context, in which all of these policies work together to actually provide people with the kind of stability and dignity to make all kinds of choices about whether, if, and under what circumstances to have families, all that, the failure to fight vociferously and to use aggressive language and to acknowledge that a fight for reproductive healthcare access is a pro-family fight. It is family, it is faith, it is freedom, it is patriotism. We ceded all that language to the right, again, maybe in the hopes that if we were just sort of subtle about it, that it would go away. And no, look at what happened.

One of the stories that you can see politically of the past couple of years is if you look at the politicians who have begun to fight fiercely on abortion, in contradiction to what so many of the consultants and advisors in the Democratic Party told them to do, and this is the story. You go talk to Gretchen Whitmer and all of her… There are no white men right now in positions of power in the Michigan State government. I went and I visited, I reported on it. It’s amazing. And they all just told the advisors to back off, and they used aggressive, combative language and also the language of patriotism, freedom, warmth about abortion access and LGBTQ protections as core American family values. And they won, and they flipped that state legislature for the first time in 40 years, and they have then followed through and put in constitutional protections.

You can see that story in a number of states and local government races around the country, and it just hasn’t yet bubbled up to the top. But interestingly, Kamala Harris has been the person in the administration where Joe Biden was absolutely in that camp of, let’s not say the abortion word for his entire life, a long and complicated history there. But the point is, Kamala was the person who was using this language, who is talking about abortion as a attribute of democracy, and she was doing that two years ago. And she is now the candidate for president.

So now we’re going to see that at the highest level, at the obsessive presidential level that everybody cares about, when in fact, we also should be caring about our school board races and our state legislative races just as much, but now we’re going to see it on a presidential stage. And I think that’s really important too. It is about not ceding that ground and thinking that if we play nice, they’re going to play nice back. That is not going to happen, and it is time we reckon with that.

Glennon Doyle:

I love that Patriot Kamala Harris was on this podcast and said, “I say we take back the flag on this issue.” This is a patriotism issue. It’s also a religious liberty issue, which we have completely ceded that with the ability to make a decision according to your own faith about your own body. I love that move. We have just given them all of the points and said, “We’ll just be real quiet and if you don’t look at us, will you let us keep what we have?”

Rebecca Traister:

Right. She said something else, that I wrote about this, and I’m not going to have the exact quote in front of me, because I don’t have the story open, but I think I can paraphrase it accurately. I was writing a story about this shift in abortion language and the fact that abortion has won democratic elections ever since the Dobbs, including ones that nobody expected Democrats to win in Red States since the Dobbs decision. And I wrote about Kamala Harris and I interviewed her for that story. She was great. She’s super smart about it. But I also was listening to the speeches she was making in public, and she said this incredible thing. I think it was in a speech in Florida, and it would’ve been in 2022 probably, and that was where she talked about abortion as an attribute of democracy, went back to the founding.

She also said this thing that is relevant to this, where she was like, “These freedoms were not just bestowed upon us, we fought for them.” She acknowledged the struggle. She said, “Look, we had to extract these freedoms and this is the fight that we’re in.” And I think that it also speaks to the spirit of what we need to do and the task in front of us, which is not to necessarily be nice, but maybe to be happy in our struggle, to be confident and full of that kind of hope and the faith that Brittney’s talking about and writing about. That is the task in front of us, is to fight hard for the protections that will pave a way to this world that we have not yet seen with our own eyes, but which we continue to imagine as we move toward the distant perfection of this union.

Glennon Doyle:

Brittney, can you talk about that? When Rebecca just said the joy in the struggle or the happiness in our fight? There is nothing that is more historically accurate of Black women and the survival and perseverance of the need for joy in the struggle, even just the way that people have been mocking Kamala Harris’ laugh and the evolution of that to that not working anymore. People seeing that laugh and gravitating towards it and knowing that that is good and we want that as opposed to the other thing. Can you talk about joy and where we are and the resonance and realness of that for our nation right now?

Brittney Cooper:

Yeah. Look, I want to say that in reference to this thing that Rebecca just said, which is about, let’s not be nice. We can be kind, we can be compassionate, we can be hopeful, we can be visionary, but now is not the time to be nice. One of the women I write about, Mary Church Terrell, said in the early 1900s, “Now is not the time for pretty words. Let’s give these boys a run for their money. Let’s get in their shit. Let’s explode it. Let’s call them weird. Let’s shame them. Let’s take the fight to them.” Because they are ridiculous and they have been making the rest of us be on the defensive and try to prove all of this stuff while they’re literally destroying things. And I know that women across the spectrum are tired of dudes playing those games. They destroy all kinds of shit all the time, and then women have to play clean up. Black women in particular have to do it. But women more generally are always going around.

So I was at an event recently with Rebecca Solnit, and one of these nuclear bros that she’s written about before decided to confront her in the middle of this thing and be terrible. And I’d had enough of his foolishness immediately, pretty much as soon as he started speaking and being abetted. And so I was like, “I just feel like you’re being sexist and disrespectful in the middle of this room.” And it was very disruptive, and he was very upset about it and all of this. Later there were all these meetings about what happened, let’s debrief, whatever. And one of my friends said to me, she said, “That’s what happens.” She says, “Men come and they act terrible, and then women have to spend their time having a bunch of meetings about how the men are terrible.”

That is what the essence of democracy is. These dudes have put us over the cliff, and so women have been on Zoom meetings trying to solve the problem of democracy. So we have to start demystifying this shit. This is what always happens. Now we’re just doing it at a macro level. We’re like, “Let’s get on a meeting and talk about how Bob really fucked the meeting up.”

Rebecca Traister:

Yes, and family reunions.

Brittney Cooper:

That’s right.

Rebecca Traister:

Uncle Jesse got drunk again and fucked up the whole family reunion.

Brittney Cooper:

“Somebody said something homophobic and transphobic at dinner, and now we’ve got to have a family meeting to…” This is the whole thing, is everybody’s having a family meeting. The only thing that’s wonderful about this moment is now apparently all the uncles are like, “You know what? We do need to have a Zoom meeting.”

Rebecca Traister:

I was on the meeting, I was on the White Dude meeting. You guys. It was great. You know what? First of all, it went long and I was like, “These guys needed this. They really needed this.” It was over three hours. I was so tired. Any of the rest of you on it?

Brittney Cooper:

But this is to your point, though. People are lonely, and all us have been sitting at home being like, “Is this democracy? We’re going to go over the cliff.” It’s like everybody has been going around being like, “We don’t know what we’re going to do” and wringing our hands. And it is this thing you talk about in Good and Mad where you’re like, “Well, these women got together and anger was the thing that brought them together.” The thing is, and dudes are lonely.

Rebecca Traister:

They’re lonely.

Brittney Cooper:

And if they agree to JD Vance’s and Donald Trump’s version of the world, look at their lives, they’re going to look terrible. They’re going to be out here with bad tans. They’re going to be saying terrible things about their wives of color, like, “Well, she’s not white, but she’s a good mother.”

Rebecca Traister:

“But I love her.”

Brittney Cooper:

That is horrible.

Rebecca Traister:

Horrible, and it’s so weak. It’s like the antithesis of the kind of masculinity that he clearly thinks he’s displaying. It’s like the weakest shit I’ve ever heard. Last night, I want to say, I was so happy for these guys. They were having a good time. They had Luke Skywalker in there. They kept asking him to say lines from Star Wars. I’m not making that up.

Amanda Doyle:

The Big Lebowski. The Big Lebowski was there?

Rebecca Traister:

The dude was there.

Amanda Doyle:

The Dude?

Rebecca Traister:

The Dude and the Lord of the Rings, Sean Astin. And by the way, so I don’t mean to actually be, I feel like I’m being patronizing in this, but I actually mean this in a nice way. These guys were having a good time. But here’s the thing I want to say that’s not patronizing. It was not perfect. There were a couple speakers where I was like, “Okay, okay.” But there were some speakers who went beyond even… There were levels of like, okay, this is good. This is good. You’re talking about it. First of all, base level, white men acknowledging that they have race and gender is a step forward, okay? I’m like, “Oh, you guys are talking about the fact that you too have identity. This is great. You’re not just the omniscient norm. You need to have your own call.” That is one real baseline step that I was so happy about.

But secondly, there were speakers. And when you were saying the thing about the DEI, and I didn’t know who everybody was last night. There was an actor who actually was talking about how in Hollywood he hears… This is so valuable. He’s like, “You hear in Hollywood, ‘Oh, you didn’t get that part because you are a white guy.'” And he’s like, “You’re hearing this all the time.” And he said, “And I just need everybody to understand,” and he broke it down and was like, “This is not true and I want you to think about all the people who are not white guys who didn’t get jobs because they weren’t white guys for so long.”

A bunch of them took apart the DEI accusations. They went after people talking about Kamala as a DEI candidate. There was actual, some of it was feel good, like Star Wars stuff, which I am all for, because these guys need to feel the connection and the joy and the things that they have in common and that there’s a white male culture, and that that is Luke Skywalker. Then there was also some actual deep analysis. And Sean Astin, the actor, was talking about, he was geeking out, standing for Dolores Huerta and talking about having door knocked with her. There was stuff in there, there was meat in there that was actually people talking about child care policy, about a child tax credit. There was actual substance in there, and there was a lot of not too, but great. I was like, “This is terrific.”

Amanda Doyle:

Yeah.

Brittney Cooper:

Yeah. So that’s the purpose of joy. When we come together around a shared purpose and we have the sense that we can actually change things. I have long said, “It’s not about happiness.” These are not happy times. There’s a lot wrong. We have a lot to fix and we have an uphill battle. But they are times that can be filled with joy. And that joy is about having a real clear sense of one’s purpose, that you have a place, that you matter in the fight, and that there is a shared thing that we can do together. And if that shared thing is, we want a baseline of democracy in this country where people’s voices matter, where people’s experiences matter, where people feel seen.

And frankly, one of the things that the White Dude call does ironically is it makes it okay for white men to be white men for once. Right now, they’re like, “Oh no, we’re always the villains in the story, but we can actually come together as white dudes and not be the villain.” And it’s like, ding, ding, ding. When you’re on the right side of democracy and history, it turns out that your identity is not some villainous thing that you have to wear like a cloak of doom. It can be the basis from which we build the new thing you want to see.

So one of the things I’m hoping over this next 90-some-odd days is that we start to look at the right and continue to externalize and say, “Y’all are weird because you don’t want to acknowledge this. You want to have multiracial marriages, JD Vance, but you don’t want to acknowledge the importance of race and multicultural families and multiracial democracy and many kinds of ways that we get to be together.” And so we have to not let them shame us for doing what we’re actually good at on the left, which is to engage in Big Ten politics. When we do it well, we’re actually really good at it. And now we have the language for it.

It’s not that identity is the salve for everything. These are tenuous connections. They do have the capacity to break down, but I think that one of the things they’re doing is helping people to realize that there are a set of issues that all matter. All of these calls, people are talking about issues. They’re talking about childcare, they’re talking about DEI, they’re talking about policy in terms of war, Ukraine, Gaza, all of these things. But they’re talking about what does that mean for your particular community that you’re a part of? Why do you as a white dude or a South Asian person or a Black woman care about this policy that may or may not seem to be about you?

So that’s democracy at work. That gives me joy. That makes me excited about this moment. And I think that the other thing we have to do is to keep saying we are the party of joy. One of my homegirls said, “It’s crazy that on the left we sell drugs, sex, and rock and roll. And yet somehow we’re like the ones who, we’re sadly dragging into the November election.”

Glennon Doyle:

Wah-wah.

Brittney Cooper:

We’re like, “No, abortion is healthcare. Sex is not just for reproduction.” And maybe we should legalize marijuana so everybody can take the edge off. And let’s have a good time. And yet somehow this was not a winning message. It should be, though.

Amanda Doyle:

Okay. Brittney, you were a champion of the Rutgers encampments against genocide. My sister and my mom and I were actually locked out of my kid’s college encampment, but we went and held our vigil from the outside of the gates. How are you both thinking… Well, it’s particularly for Brittney. How are you thinking about your support for Kamala intersecting with your support for a free Palestine?

Brittney Cooper:

Yes. So let me say straight up, we have to have a free Palestine. We have to have a permanent ceasefire. We’ve got to have a possibility not only of self-determination for Palestinian people, but a real conversation about what restoration looks like given the way that this war has decimated all of Palestine and created trauma that is going to last generations. So my commitment to that is steadfast. My commitment to pushing this administration to be better on it is steadfast.

I do think Kamala is appreciably better on the point than Biden. I saw her come out and use words like “Palestinian people.” “We have to end Palestinian suffering.” “Islamophobia is bad just as anti-Semitism is bad,” right? There wasn’t this sort of overture to a kind of Zionism like what you see Joe Biden doing in the speeches that he’s given recently. So here’s what I will also say, though, and this is a needle that I’m having to thread very carefully in my life as someone who feels accountability to Palestinian folk and Palestinian communities and also feels accountability primarily to Black folk in the US.

Black people do not get to be one issue people. We are not single issue people. It is not a single issue struggle. We have spent a lot of time in this podcast talking about all of the things that come out of intersectional understanding, namely, that we have identities. And as a Black woman who is intersectionally connected to multiple communities, I need a presidency that’s going to deal with the maternal mortality crisis. I need a presidency where we’re going to have a robust public health infrastructure, because we lost over 150,000 Black people to COVID because the former president thought it reasonable to slow walk his response when it looked like there were old Black people dying of COVID at the beginning of that pandemic. It is a mass disabling event, and you have one candidate who mocks disabled people and disabled veterans, and you have the potential on the left for us to have policy around disability, which we’re going to increasingly need in this country after people continue to get COVID multiple times.

I need economic policy that actually serves the working class Black women in my community who are raising kids, who didn’t go to college, and who really need for some semblance of democracy to work. I can’t go home to those folks and say to them that I allowed a fascist to become the president because of my commitments to the folk of Gaza. And also, allowing a fascist to become president is not a commitment to the people of Palestine. It’s not better policy for them. The first thing that Donald Trump did when he got into office was to ban Muslim people. That, helped along by Project 25, will be even worse. So I think that now is the time to push, particularly in this moment in the run-up to elections, for more robust commitments from a potential would-be Harris administration on what she’s going to actually do to end the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and to get them some redress.

I appreciated that she didn’t go to Netanyahu’s speech. I appreciated that she met with them and then said, “Here is the way I’m thinking about it.” She has a kind of classic Democratic party line, which is that she believes in a two-state solution. My Palestinian colleagues would say that is not their vision of justice. What I would say is that it is certainly better than what we have had, and it acknowledges that Palestinian folks have the right to self-determination. And I believe that that’s on the way to a better way of thinking about this.

So what I want to encourage folks to do is to recognize that fascism does not make an environment where we can have meetings, where we can have dissension, where we can have conflict, where we can have robust conversations about democracy, where we can actually attempt to be a visionary force for the future in a particular way. I am not without conflict about it, not without conflict about the ways that the United States has facilitated this genocide.

So here’s the last thing I’ll say. I was talking to friends about this morning. Because I’m also with a bunch of academic Black folks who have a lot of radical commitments and often use the platforms that they have to then discourage people from voting, because they say things like, “Both parties are the same.” That’s patently untrue and it’s disinformation of a certain kind and it’s not helpful. The thing that I don’t think that some of the academics who want to keep their radical commitments acknowledged is that they’re relying on rank and file Black and brown voters to save democracy-

Rebecca Traister:

Yes. Yes.

Brittney Cooper:

… while they get to sit with their radical principles and then look at the rest of us and say, “See, we knew this shit was terrible.” But you are relying on these people to save your ability to actually dissent.

Rebecca Traister:

Whew.

Brittney Cooper:

And then if it goes belly up and we don’t win, and the fascists get to take over, what I know about many of those academics is that they just all planning to move to Portugal. And they’ll use their money and they’ll do it, and the rest of us will be here. I can’t see how that’s a commitment to loving the people.

When I say that I do this work because I’m committed to loving the people, I can have a radical critique of the United States. I can have a radical critique of the Democratic Party that’s historically rooted. Ida B Wells said the Democratic Party and the Republican Party did not do what they needed to do for Black people, and she said that in the 1880s, and it remains true. But what also remains true is that Black people have put their blood, sweat and tears into the best vision of what this country can be. I think that’s part of my own political inheritance to have and to claim and to work for. I think there’s a particular kind of cynicism, and rooted in that cynicism is a kind of cowardice that is about a desire to not be wrong.

When folks say that they’re going to bow out, it is about a desire to not be made a fool of, but all of us have to be a fool for something, and I’m going to be a fool for the side that says that the people can fight toward the future they want to have. And so if I get made a fool of because that is what I choose to believe in, then that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

Rebecca Traister:

Shit.

Amanda Doyle:

Okay. Is there anything else that needs to be said that hasn’t been said? Is there anything you want to leave us with? I can’t imagine there is, but if there is-

Rebecca Traister:

We could go on for another six hours, but we can’t for literal time reasons and that we both have to work and you guys do too.

Amanda Doyle:

Okay. So as soon as we hang up, I’m going to just email you again and beg you both to come back next month. So just be ready for that. Thank you both. That’s all I want to say is thank you both. We will have every single link to find you everywhere, because we will be following your every word for the next a hundred days and years. Pod squad, thank you so much. Bye.

Rebecca Traister:

Thank you.

Amanda Doyle:

If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us if you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you’ll never miss an episode, and it helps us because you’ll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you’re there, if you’d be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much.

We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle, in partnership with Odyssey. Our executive producer is Jenna Wise Berman, and the show is produced by Lauren LoGrasso, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz. Also, by Allison Schott and Dina Cabana.