Transcript: Anti-Blackness Is at the Heart of Trump’s Toxic Politics

Crenshaw: Change what money can do. I think that is—that’s all behind what campaign finance reform was all about. We’re inheriting a world that was created by the intersection of the attack on voting rights and the attack on campaign finance reform, right? This is the world bequeathed to us by the Supreme Court, given to us by the most dominant person on that Supreme Court right now, which is Clarence Thomas.

So what is it that money is allowing politics to become? How is it that a coherent project of dismantling the government, and the societal consensus that there is work to be done and there will continue to be work to be done to make this a truly multiracial democracy? It’s always going to be a post-slavery, post-genocide, post-segregation society, but what kind of “post” that looks like.

Is it going to be a complete repudiation of that history, a dismantling of that history, and a building of a new democracy built on the foundation of repudiating that stuff? Is it going to be that—is that what we mean by “post”? Or is it just, Oh, that happened a long time ago, we don’t talk about it anymore, and, in fact, we’re going to create laws that make it impossible to talk about it? Because if you don’t talk about it, you don’t name it, you don’t see it playing out in contemporary society, then that undermines the very basis for doing anything about it. It undermines equal opportunity. It undermines the Voting Rights Act, which we may lose because of this effort to push history off the table.

So the last and most important part of our report on anti-Blackness is how to connect it with the assault on museums, the assault on critical race theory, the assault on books. When we look at books that are being censored, 40 percent of them are written by people of color, women, or queer people. The idea is just to take the words out of our mouths, take the audience away—so what we saw in 2020 doesn’t happen again.

Bacon: This obviously matters. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be trying to ban them.

Crenshaw: Exactly. My good mentor always tells me, Kim, dogs don’t bark at parked cars. They’re coming after critical race theory, 1619, intersectionality because these ideas mobilized people; it gave them the language to actually articulate what they were seeing with their own eyes. When you see something, you look for a way to express it, a way to represent your outrage about it. These were the kinds of conversations that the George Floyd–Breonna Taylor moment created for the entire society.

So did we see backlash coming? Absolutely. I mean, that is the history of America. Whenever we go two steps forward, we go a few steps back. The problem was: Were we going to go further back than two steps? Were we going to be like the end of Reconstruction, where we had eight years in power and nearly eight decades of racial tyranny? Is it going to be that kind of backlash? And I think that’s the moment that we’re in right now.

It’s clear that it’s a backlash. It’s clear that all those companies that jumped out there—Target, McDonalds, we can go on and on—that refound and declared their commitment to racial justice are now on a Whoops, we went too far, and now they’re correcting. And the question is: Is that correction going to be for the rest of this century? The rest of our lifetimes? It’s definitely going to go beyond 2028, and that is precisely why we are trying to call liberals and progressives into the conversation because the distance that this will go is not really going to be determined by MAGA. They’re on brand. They’re going to ride this to the end of the earth and beyond.

The question is: Are we going to be able to galvanize our resources and our commitments? Remember what happens when race gets erased. Remember what it was that galvanized so many people in 2020, and galvanized people in 1964, and galvanized people in 1863. Are we going to remember that those are the true moments where we were making our democracy? When we were willing to step back and make deals and disenfranchise entire groups of people—that is when our democracy faltered, and that is when we lost our power.

Bacon: So, Pete Buttigieg was at the Texas Tribune’s Festival maybe two weeks ago, and he gave this speech about how we lost our way because we started talking about identity so much; that was the only thing people heard from us. OK, so that’s what he said. I think, due respect to Pete Buttigieg, he’s someone who wants to be elected president. I think he’s trying to figure out where things are.

What do we want the sort of aspiring Democrat to sound like when talking about the sort of race—the place of where we are in race right now? What do we want that person to sound like? Because a President Buttigieg is not going to bring us forward very much. We need the next administration to move us out of this.

And what is that? What do you want—a language that is both appealing to maybe middle America but also moves us in the right direction?

Crenshaw: Yeah, I’m going to be frank at this moment. Pete should be the last one talking about identity at this moment as being the problem. I’m sure he wouldn’t say that marriage equality is about identity politics. I’m sure he wouldn’t say his right to raise his children is identity politics gone too far. But what would he say about affirmative action, or what would he say about issues that have to do with the history of Blackness being a constraint?

So, number one, I would be very cautious about giving an inch to the idea that what Democrats have failed to do is to distance themselves from identity politics. The party of the Democrats gave us the Voting Rights Act. It gave us Medicaid, Medicare. It gave us the things that we take for granted and that we build on to expand rights. We can’t start then dismantling that stuff because what that basically means is we’re drawing divisions between some constituencies whose rights have come out of this moment, this movement, and others. That’s a disaster for us.

I think the second thing that I would want our politicians to do is stop listening to the pollsters who are making stuff up and finding groups of people to convey that stuff. We did polling and focus group work in Virginia in the aftermath of Youngkin’s victory, and we found very different things than the folks who are looking for evidence that it’s identity politics that defeated us. We heard from white voters—likely white Democratic voters—who were pissed off and angry that their party, the party that they cast their votes for, the party that they believe has their best interests in mind, were so anxious to throw overboard a whole range of interests that they believed in, in search for the Reagan voter who left a generation ago and is unlikely to come back.

They want a full-throated argument for the kind of democracy that they think Democrats embrace. They don’t want a lot of pivoting—and I call it shucking and jiving—around the question of how our democracy has broken and what we need to do to fix it.

So, I think there is a polling industrial complex that has gotten behind the idea that there are certain things we can’t talk about. I think you hear it bubbling up with Ezra Klein and the whole thing about how Charlie Kirk practiced politics the right way, and Democrats who are willing to say we should model him. That the only way they can do that is to not talk about white supremacy and racism. And the only way you can do that is to say: You folks who have to deal with that, deal with that on your private time—we’re not bringing this into mainstream politics.

That, to me, feels like disenfranchisement. It’s not that the Democrats are signing on to You can’t vote. They’re signing on to We’re going to remove things for you to vote for, right? We’re not going to talk about the things that really matter to you. We’re not going to talk about the racism that is now everywhere. We’re not going to talk about the fact that the Coast Guard has now said that a noose and a swastika are no longer hate symbols.

People need to see what is happening, know that the history tells us that the last time that the party of racial justice decided to step back and negotiate a settlement with the party that represented white supremacy, we lost our right to vote. And with it we lost a whole range of policies for generations. We can’t afford that now.

Bacon: Let me do my Democratic pundit, white pundit imitation here. Did you know that Donald Trump won more Black voters than any Republican since Ronald Reagan? Did you—you know, maybe Perry Bacon and Crenshaw, educated people with college degrees … but the regular working-class African Americans really like Donald Trump, and maybe BLM turned them off. How do you respond to that?

Crenshaw: That is what they say. I have a couple of things. First of all, we are still talking about 87 and more percent of Black people—Black men—voting against Donald Trump.

Bacon: Have you interviewed every Black man who voted for Donald Trump?

Crenshaw: No, you definitely got to start with your baseline of single-digit percentages. And you also have to deal with the disproportionate number of Black women who saw the handwriting on the wall, understood what was happening when they went after Kamala Harris and Claudine Gay, and said, Hell to the no.

And let’s also point this out: Black people are disproportionately working class. Black women are disproportionately working class. Black women’s median wealth is less than $100. So what I push back is: If it was really about class, explain to me why Black women—who have more incentive than anybody else to vote for the class-forward president—understood exactly what he was going to do, which is make life harder for working-class people.

So I turn that around: That’s your identity politics showing right now, right? You’re writing Black people and Black women out of your class concern, and you’re putting white middle-class people in. I remind them that the January 6 people were not working-class people. These were people, middle-income if not higher, who were basically in communities that have undergone dramatic demographic shifts.

Now, if you want to talk about identity politics, let’s talk about that. And if you think that not talking about xenophobia, not talking about—and trying to disabuse people of the idea that because Trump is white and he’s talking to their whiteness, that he’s got them on speed dial and he’s concerned about them.… You cannot disconnect them from their investment by not talking about it.

That is magical thinking. And that magical thinking has gotten us into trouble before, and it’s going to get us into trouble now if we’re willing to let our base go and let our values go, trying to pursue the people who don’t want you.

Bacon: Let’s finish. That was great, I’m glad you said this. I’m late, but let’s finish with this: Donald Trump is president for another three years, sadly. So what do we do? If anti-Blackness is the trope—one of the powerful weapons he’s using—what do we do for these next three years?

Crenshaw: I think the number one thing that we have to do is insist on refusing to comply—refusing the preemptive concession.

This is what we’re seeing everywhere. We’re seeing it. I teach at Columbia University. We’re seeing it in law firms—I’m a lawyer—we’re seeing people comply without sometimes even being fully forced to. And we see the compliance first coming on DEI, first coming on the places where their commitments were weak.

We cannot allow that compliance to be cost-free. Because unless we change the equation on the ground, there really is no reason for Target, for the law firms, for the foundations to say, Look, this is a hot potato. We know he doesn’t like this stuff. He’s shown us he doesn’t like it. Let’s give in on it.

When that happens, our institutions and our allies—they’re not becoming neutralized. They become part of the army that’s dismantling our democracy. I used this analogy the other day, and some of my friends said, “You watched that?” I used to be a big Game of Thrones fan, and I remember when the evil army would kill the good folks, let’s say. It wasn’t just that the army we were rooting for lost their soldiers and weapons—those people became the army on the other side.

So I remember when the dragon got killed, and I was like, “Oh, dang—she lost her dragon.” And then when it rose again as the ice dragon, I was like, That’s a double loss. Every time they take somebody out, they come back on the other side, and they become a weapon for dismantling a democracy.

So look at the law firms. The law firms not only have been pushed out of defending people like us—now some of them are taking on Trump’s agenda. So they’ve become the ice dragon on the other side.

The same with our universities. Not only are our universities backing away from active recruiting, but they’re buying into this idea that there’s such a thing as too many Black people on campus—because that will raise questions about what we’re doing. So across the board, I’m seeing our allies saying the one thing that we can do to be safe is not talk about your stuff and not realizing that not talking about our stuff is undermining all of us.

We’re all about trying to say: Look, number one, a lot of this stuff is not legal, it’s not required. You have got to be willing to fight—people shed blood and gave their lives to get to this point. So, it’s not for you to be comfortable. Fascism doesn’t thrive because people resist comfort; it thrives because they can still go to the restaurants, they can still go to movies, and they can still kick people under the bus.

We’ve got to understand what kind of fight we’re in, and it does mean discomfort. It does mean the willingness to fight, and sometimes that fight has to be in our own cave. We often say that the call is coming from inside the house, right? The horror movie—when you think it’s all out there, but it’s actually in the house. We’ve got stuff in the house, and that’s why we did this report: so people can figure out where in the house they need to look, and where they need to fight back.

Bacon: Dr. Crenshaw, tell people where they can find this report.

Crenshaw: You can find the report at our website: www.aapf.org. AAPF stands for the African American Policy Forum, so you can find the report there.

And check out Freedom to Learn. Because we’re trying to defend the Smithsonian, and all of the Black history that they’re destroying as a way to make us illiterate. And when you’re illiterate, you’re easier to control. We all know that.

Bacon: And then where, since you’re such a brilliant thinker, where can we find your thoughts? Are you on social media anywhere?

Crenshaw: So I’m old school and a little bit of new school. My largest following used to be on X, but I don’t post there anymore. You can find me on Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

Bacon: That’s a lot. Are you doing a newsletter? Everybody has a newsletter these days. Where are you writing these days?

Crenshaw: My producer would kill me if I didn’t say that we have a podcast, an award-winning podcast called Intersectionality Matters. We just won a Silver [Anthem] award for our special episode on Selma, “60 Years Later.” If you don’t listen to anything, please go and listen to that. It gives you both the understanding about why voting rights are so vital right now and what we need to do to defend it. And we also have a special series in the podcast on the true history of critical race theory called “The United States of Amnesia.” So if you want receipts, you have a sense that what you’re hearing isn’t quite right, but you don’t have time to read that big red book, go check out Intersectionality Matters. We have a special series on critical race theory there.

Bacon: And we’ll stop there. I’ve met you a couple of times, and I’m always excited to talk to you—somebody I read when I was in college, not to make you feel old, but hopefully to help you understand you’ve had an impact on so many people. So, thanks for joining me, and I appreciate it. Good to see you.

Crenshaw: Thank you, Perry. A pleasure.