‘There Is Nothing at All That Replaces Grassroots Organizing’ - CounterSpin broadcast with Sumi Cho and Alicia Garza on intersection and the election

Excerpts from the African American Policy Forum’s webinar on the election were aired on the November 25, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. | MP3 Link

Janine Jackson: For some people, one of the takeaways from the 2016 election was the importance of what’s called intersectionality, the recognition that things like people’s race, religion, gender, class, orientation or immigration status are not isolatable factors. And also that what might be called economic anxiety, for example, can’t necessarily be extracted from its racialized expression.

Some even dared hope that wider acknowledgement of this might be a kind of silver lining of the election result. Commercial media don’t seem to be advancing those sorts of conversations, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happening.

“Social Justice SOS: What Happened, What’s Coming and Why We Must Join Together Against Hate” was the name of a recent online event hosted by the African American Policy Forum (on whose board I serve, I will note). There were a number of speakers included across a range of fields. You can listen to the event on the website AAPF.org. Today we’re going to just hear a couple of clips.

First up is Sumi Cho, professor and associate dean at DePaul University School of Law. As media ask themselves why their predictions of the presidential election results were so wrong, one of the things we hear most about is polling. Cho talked about how it’s not just the interpretation of polls or people lying to pollsters we need to think about, but polling methods themselves can misshape our understanding.

Sumi Cho: While 53 percent of white women supporting Donald Trump, in light of his history, comments and actions, is truly astounding and disturbing, I want to suggest that it actually may be worse than has been portrayed, because Latinos and Asian-American women likely supported Clinton and voted against Trump in far higher numbers than has been reported by the exit polls conducted by the National Election Pool. So how did this happen?

Well, exit poll surveys aren’t designed to actually reach representative samples of groups like Asian-Americans and Latinos, and so we end up having one major national exit poll conducted for the National Election Pool, which all the major media outlets use, and the method that they use, as conducted by Edison Research in particular, surveys Asian-Americans and Latinos in a way that’s statistically more likely to capture Republicans.

How? Well, mainstream pollsters too often use too small a sample to be reliable, they don’t construct samples that reflect the diversity within those communities, and they don’t conduct interviews in Asian languages or Spanish, at the first contact or ever. And so these practices, taken together, bias the sample, because they tend to miss those in the polls that are more likely to be Democrats—that is, immigrants, native language-dominant, lower SES, younger voters.

And so if you compare what’s been said about the Latino vote, for example, by the National Election Pool, it said that they voted 29 percent for Trump—which is truly surprising, since he wants to build a wall, right, to keep them out—and 65 percent for Clinton. But if you look at the Latino Decisions polling, which was done by a number of coalitional groups that have expertise in reaching out to this community, it’s more like 79 percent Clinton, 18 percent Trump. And when you look at Latinas, it’s even higher of course, with the gender gap: 86 percent Clinton, 12 percent Trump.

APA population, similarly, instead of 65 percent Clinton, 29 Trump, it was really 75/19, and when you look at women, 79/17. So, finally, if you break out Jewish women from the category of white women, Jews voted 71/24 for Clinton over Trump, leaving white Protestant woman voting 32 percent Clinton, 64 percent Trump.

And so when you go into the narratives, I think there’s all these theses out that’s being captured by, like, the New York Times, trying to figure out what it did wrong in missing this election. And so you hear these dominant narratives of, oh, there’s a sort of Ivanka voter, or there’s this kind of “good father/beautiful family” thesis, or “I want my daughter to be a successful businessman” type of thesis.

But buried at the back of that same New York Times article on the women who helped Donald Trump to victory, it finally gets to the issue of race, if you’re still reading. And it states that these white women supporters of Trump are “troubled…by an America that seems to have embraced multiculturalism and political correctness without question.” And “they said they didn’t understand the Black Lives Matter movement,” they “wondered why Democrats seemed so fixated on transgender access to bathrooms, and tended to be enraged at the way veterans are treated and violence directed at the police.” And that they were “concerned about immigration and the threat of terrorism.”

And so it helps explain why all of the sexist, misogynistic, xenophobic comments and actions never disqualified Trump from being eligible to be president for these voters, because of their commitment to a very racialized patriarchy.

Janine Jackson: That was DePaul University law professor Sumi Cho.

Well, demographics help us highlight differing experiences, but intersectionality recognizes that people have multiple identities and can face multilayered sorts of discrimination. All of the speakers emphasized the importance of seeing people whole and connecting across difference. That’s something pundits often talk about, but organizers actually do. One such organizer is Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter. Here’s some of what she had to say.

Alicia Garza: I think that one of the things that is scaring me is that I’m starting to see the left, as a broad kind of swath, move back into some pretty dangerous tendencies. So one dangerous tendency is to assume that because we are terrified, anxious, fearful and scared, quite frankly, of what the potential of this kind of not just administration, but political terrain, means for our communities right now, and in the intermediate term and in the long term, there’s a tendency that we then have to go back into our silos.

So we are under attack, my particular group is under attack, I don’t have time to think about what your group is dealing with, I just need to fight like hell to save my own people. And that is the worst possible thing that we could be doing right now. There is no better time than now for us to really figure out how to work intersectional politics in practice.

And with that, we also need to make sure that we are not just talking to people who already agree with us, but that we are reaching out to folks who, quite frankly—I mean, the comments earlier about people saying, well, I’m confused about what is the Black Lives Matter movement, I’m upset about why people care about why trans people should be able to use bathrooms. We need to do a better job of reaching out to those folks, and making sure that our vision also is a vision for them.

And that is different from capitulating to the worst tendency of this moment. Under no circumstance should we normalize, capitulate, negotiate with, compromise with any vision that removes humanity from anybody. And we need to be really careful about that, because I do think that there’s a failed strategy, right, that people call “playing for the center,” but what they actually mean is camouflaging themselves as part of the right, and they’re very different things.

I mean, when you look at those maps, it is very clear what we need to be doing. And to me, I think one thing we’ve got to be really, really clear and strong on is that there is nothing at all that replaces grassroots organizing. Absolutely nothing at all. And I think it’s important for us to continue to think about, how do we use technology-based tools to reach more people, but it is not a substitute for having real conversations with folks in real plain language, right, that really push out not only what’s at stake, which we’re really good at. We are really good at sounding the alarm and being, like, we’re about to run over a cliff. But we’re not that great yet and we need to get much better about being able to talk about what’s on the other side, and really paint that picture in a way that people can taste touch, feel and smell.

Another thing that I think is really important here is to do both. So as Mary Frances said, absolutely 100 percent active opposition to all of the reactionary policies and practices that are moving in real time right now. But that deep-organizing piece, I think we also need to make sure that we are locating that appropriately in the Midwest and in the South, and being led by folks who have been doing that organizing, isolated from the rest of the country and, quite frankly, overshadowed by the visions and the strategies that are coming from people on the coasts.

We all have something to contribute, but I think if we’re going to get real about what strategies will work to change what that map looks like, it absolutely needs to be led by folk who have been treading water in this landscape for a long time before the rest of us started to really feel it, touch it, taste it, etc.

Janine Jackson: That was Alicia Garza of Black Lives Matter. You can find the full “Social Justice SOS” webinar on the African American Policy Forum website, AAPF.org.

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