Just when I thought the racialized madness of 2020 was floating away — that it had being destroyed by reason and sanity.
It’s back. And on Zoom no less, the medium of choice for the crazy Covid era.
With a woman of color on the Democratic ticket, progressives have fallen back on their worst instincts: performative allyship and race essentialism. Politics by segregation.
Last week, Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts organized a massive Zoom meeting — “White Women: Answer the Call” — for Kamala Harris.
On the call, which drew over 200,000 participants, reportedly raised $2 million and has been dubbed the largest Zoom in history, Watts declared (with great humility, of course): “White women, we have 100 days to help save the world.”
I thought white saviors were bad? Hey, on the plus side, the left suddenly knows what a woman is again.
Author Glennon Doyle lectured. The singer Pink was there. “The White Lotus” actress Connie Britton spoke, jokingly calling herself and the others “Karens for Kamala.”
In other words, gazillionaire elites with the luxury of telling other women — ones who may be worried about paying their grocery bills — that they should cede their personal interests in favor of intersectionality.
And then there was influencer Arielle Fodor, who has 1.3 million followers on TikTok, where she is known as Mrs. Frazzled. She speaks like a mid-level marketing mama on the verge of being invited to the annual conference in Cabo if only she can enlist five more eager wine moms to her vitamin-selling team.
Fodor was introduced as someone “here to help gentle parent us through this election.”
Perhaps because I am personally familiar with wooden spoon parenting, this came off as incredibly infantilizing. But hey, maybe it’s just this white woman.
“BIPOC women have tapped us in as white women to step up, listen and get involved this election season,” she said.
Thank you, BIPOC women, for allowing your white proxy to give us other white chicks explicit permission to exercise our rights as Americans.
Fodor outlined ways to use white privilege “to make positive changes.” Chief among them: Shut up.
“if you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals or, God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat. And instead we can put our listening ears on.”
Oh, the soft bigotry.
Politics by strict affinity groups is not only the height of cringe — regressive and reductive. It’s also clearly the #KHive plan, as member are organizing Zoom pep rallies by ethnicities and gender.
There’s also “White Dudes for Harris” on Monday night, which comes with Pete Buttigieg and trucker-cap merch.
There are grass-roots calls for South Asians, Latina women, black men. And while it’s not out of the realm to campaign to specific demographics, the spirit isn’t about building a coalition.
In this version, we all fit in neat little boxes that correspond with our immutable characteristics.
What happened to rugged individualism? What happened to thinking for yourself and freedom of thought, free from the boxes you check on a census form.
The liberal women I grew up around made fun of Stepford Wives, only to become an even more bizarre version of them: bots programmed to speak in therapeutic language while performing guilt rituals in the name of virtue.
Real people — men and women of all races and creeds — want intellectual rigor. We want to discuss ideas. We want to disagree like adults, not be shushed like kindergartners in segregated classrooms.
If this is the campaign, it doesn’t bode well for a Harris presidency. Will debate and dissent only be allowed if the person is the right race and sex?
Will citizens need permission to question Harris because that wouldn’t be using our privilege properly? It’s probably how Putin and Xi run things, right?
I want to live in a world where adults are in charge and the best ideas win. Regardless of who came up with them.
