[link removed]

FAIR
View article on FAIR's website ([link removed])
'You Cannot Change a Reality That You Cannot Name': Janine Jackson ([link removed])


Janine Jackson interviewed scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, co-founder of the African-American Policy Forum, about anti-Blackness for the December 26, 2025, episode ([link removed]) of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

[link removed]


AAPF: Anti-Blackness Is the Point

AAPF (10/25 ([link removed]) )

Janine Jackson: Even those who understood that many forces in this country never let go of racist, sexist ideas are shocked by the velocity of the rocketing backward toward an inglorious past of violent, official oppression. It's not just the hateful ugly racism ([link removed]) of MAGA, the overt yearning for the time ([link removed]) when Black people were deemed beings of an inferior order, with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” but the relative ease with which supposedly countervailing liberal forces, including the press corps, have swallowed it all. The book bans ([link removed]) , the killing of equity-advancing programs ([link removed]) , the labeling of any achievement by someone not a
white man as illegitimate ([link removed]) .

As we try to resist this—not just to beat it back, but to overcome it—it's important to see the core thread of anti-Blackness in this effort that is, yes, global, yes, top down, yes, multifaceted, but crucially grounded in this country's history of what we used to call “race relations.”

Anti-Blackness Is the Point ([link removed]) is the title of a new report from the African American Policy Forum ([link removed]) , on whose board I serve. We're joined now by the group's co-founder and executive director, Kimberlé Crenshaw ([link removed]) . She's also founder and director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies ([link removed]) at Columbia Law School, where she teaches law, as well as UCLA. And, in her spare time, she hosts the podcast Intersectionality Matters ([link removed]) . Welcome back to CounterSpin, Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Kimberlé Crenshaw: Thanks, Janine. It's always a pleasure.

JJ: The full title of the report is Anti-Blackness Is the Point: Racism, Misogyny and Donald Trump's Assault on Equal Opportunity. So we could start lots of places, but let's jump in with just these key pillars, or these key ways that anti-Blackness is doing work right now. Even as it may be clouded a little, because there's so much hate and fear going around, but it feels like a mistake to skip a moment—that seems to be the moment we always skip—if we want to talk about what's going on. So we saw this from before Day One ([link removed]) with Donald Trump, right?
Press Watch: Political reporters are actively covering up Trump’s racism

Press Watch (1/30/25 ([link removed]) )

KC: We've been, I think, in an anti-Blackness storm for at least the last five years. What we're seeing now is it turning into a full-scale hurricane, and the fact that, as you mentioned, the media haven't spoken ([link removed]) about it; our elected officials, those who rely on our votes for their seats, haven't deemed it important enough to address; and civil society seems to just be taking a sort of “ho hum” response to it. So you have this hurricane happening, on one hand, and you have silence on the other.

So we decided that it was important for us, not only to name anti-Blackness, but to provide the receipts for it, the sites where you can see it, so that those who are experiencing it understand that it's a thing, and also to provide our allies with the receipts, so that they are better able to call it out and fight it. So anti-Blackness is the point of the agenda, and the particular sites of this anti-Blackness is the most important contribution that we hope the report is making.

JJ: And when you're talking about the sort of spokes or the sites of that, I think folks will recognize them. They can come in any order, but one of them is certainly the normalizing of rhetoric. And we can separate rhetoric and language from policy and practice, but they're so interconnected, they're so interwoven. But the normalizing of certain kinds of language is definitely a part of it.
Jacobin: The Far Right’s Weird Obsession With Kamala Harris’s IQ

Jacobin (11/1/24 ([link removed]) )

KC: And our sense is that one of the vehicles of this normalization is the failure of so many of our allies and advocates to be able to address misogynoir, their inability to understand that when a presidential candidate who is a Black woman is basically labeled as "lazy" ([link removed]) and a "low IQ person," ([link removed]) or when she's been framed in sexualized terms, like the T-shirts ([link removed]) that label her as “Joe and the hoe,” this deterioration of civil rhetoric is made possible, in part, because Black women have largely been undefended terrain. The things that can be said about them, the ways that they've been framed in political culture, have more or less opened the door to a kind of rhetoric that we tend to say, if people are saying the quiet part out loud, well, not only are they saying out
loud, they're yelling it off of the rooftops, and they're doing it in ways that harness misogynoir towards broader ends.

So, yeah, when we see the attacks on Black women in power, when we hear the president immediately launching into anti-DEI language in the face of an airline disaster ([link removed]) or an accident in Baltimore Harbor ([link removed]) , part of the condition of that possibility is the fact that what they are harnessing is anti-Black stereotypes to undermine the entire DEI infrastructure, the idea that Black people are lazy, the idea that Black people are not intelligent.

Being able to label somebody like Kamala Harris as that, and all the Black women in government, from Ketanji Brown Jackson ([link removed]) to Lisa Cook ([link removed]) , Gwynne Wilcox, Carla Hayden ([link removed]) , all of these are Black women of authority who've been undermined ([link removed]) , and that language, that undermining, then spreads to the entirety of DEI. That's the work that anti-Blackness, misogynoir in particular, is doing.

JJ: And when you say they “harness ideas,” they're tapping into something. Folks who are making these assaults on Black women are tapping into something that they know already exists. They're not creating a new stereotype, they're accessing one. And I think that's really important for folks to understand. Why does that go down so easy, to say that a Black woman only got to where she's at through being a prostitute, through tricking people, through cheating on things. You can't just start on their….

KC: Or elbowing their way in.

JJ: Exactly:
19th: ‘There is nowhere I feel safe’: Election workers targeted by Trump describe flood of sexist, racist threats

19th (6/21/22 ([link removed]) )

KC: Loud talking their way in. And we saw it, and again, I think it wasn't defended as much as the insult would have suggested, but remember, the entire argument about the stolen election rested on Black women poll workers ([link removed]) who were supposedly doing nefarious things.

And let's not forget that we even have administration officials like Darren Beattie, who said that competent white men ([link removed]) must be in charge if you want things to work. Now, four years ago, 10 years ago, that would have been a disqualifying statement. You couldn't hold onto an administration position having said something like that. But the terrain has been so overturned by the regularity of this kind of assault and insult, and the fact that the resistance has been tepid at best, now these are things that can be freely and openly said without any consequence whatsoever.

JJ: And we know that folks simply tend to, many people, listen to voices of authority, people who speak in a certain cadence, people who are wearing a suit and tie, whatever they're saying sounds like it's been vetted by the powers that be, and it must be authoritative in some way.

And so here's where we make a connection between this wild rhetoric which, as you say, would have been commented on as beyond the pale years ago, is like, “You can't say this, you can't even think this.” You can't think, "Oh, this country has to be run by white men, and everyone else is inferior." We don't say that. That's not our mission.

Now that you can say it, well, hey, why wouldn't it be our mission? And so here's where you see the bridge to actually dismantling any efforts that were used to fight against the obvious, historical, continuing discrimination ([link removed]) against Black people, against Black women, against women.

Now you can dismantle that. Now you can take that all apart, because you've already said, any failures that these people face are their own fault, right? So this translates into policy.
Truthout: Dept. of Education Halts Thousands of Civil Rights Investigations Under Trump

Truthout (2/15/25 ([link removed]) )

KC: Absolutely. And that's where we see the rollbacks of equity efforts in the public sector, in the private sector. People are fully aware about the dismantling ([link removed]) of the Department of Education, for example. Beyond that is the pausing of 10,000 pending discrimination complaints ([link removed] up for The Big,same time period last year) . We see the same thing at HUD: the cancellation, basically, of protection against housing discrimination. ([link removed]) We see the Department of Justice actually reversing their longstanding mission of fighting for racial equity and justice, and now turning it into a department that is pursuing white complaints ([link removed])
.

We see this across the board. Once you have normalized discourse that affirms race and gender hierarchies, once you've said that the very idea of race being socially constructed rather than biological is an improper ideology ([link removed]) , once you've actually broken the dam, all of these actions come swiftly in the wake of it.

This is the piece that is most frustrating, when we think about the media and our allies. The report isn't designed to persuade, or provide the receipts, to anybody who really believes that this is what we need to make America great again. They're on brand.

It's the folks who claim to want a multiracial society, believe that all the advances that happened in the '60s, '70s and '80s were good things, and believe that we would be able to hold the line.
Current Affairs: Time To End The Use of ‘Woke’ As a Pejorative

Current Affairs (3/17/23 ([link removed]) )

Yet when it became clear that the line was being crossed, again and again and again, they, No. 1, did not step up and call out this agenda. And, No. 2, when they did speak to it, they often spoke to it as, "Well, that's the problem of wokeness ([link removed]) ,” rather than, the assault on wokeness is the Trojan horse that is undermining all of the values, and all of the policies and practices, that were put in place to embrace our commitments to equity and inclusion.

That's what this report is trying to call out. We cannot look at this and not speak against it, and hope that we're going to be able to hold the line.

JJ: I think one of the most important pieces for me in reading it was just the language of, “We are severing the link between racial justice and democracy.” This is so crucial to me, because I know that a lot of folks believe that they are doing pro-democracy work, that they're doing anti-anti-democratic work, and they are. But democracy is still somehow a city on a hill that doesn't have actual occupants. It's still an abstraction, and racial justice work is muddy and is complicated, and involves looking back at things. And I just think that once you let that go, then you're working with something hollow.

And I said at the beginning, if we want to not just beat this back, but overcome it, and I think that's important. Do we really want to learn enough to really actually learn, or do we just want to be in a high-profile fight, and then maybe Democrats win at the midterm, and maybe that feels like, yay, our team wins…. We have to have a longer, deeper view.
Kimberle Crenshaw

Kimberle Crenshaw: "Every time this democracy has been threatened, every time we've almost fallen apart, the core of it has been the manipulation of racial resentment and white supremacy."

KC: Yeah, absolutely. And part of the justification that's been given for the separation between pro-democracy work and racial justice work is that we have to—those who do the pro-democracy—we have to frame this work ([link removed]) in language that the majority of Americans agree with and can get behind, which is a striking concession about how effective the right has been in problematizing racial justice, and how ineffective liberals and progressives have been in making clear that we do not have a democracy without racial justice. Every time this democracy has been threatened, every time we've almost fallen apart, the core of it has been the manipulation of racial resentment and white supremacy.

So to try to sever these dimensions of American life, to ignore that one of the main things that motivated January 6 was the belief that the election was stolen by people of color ([link removed]) —race was not a subtext; it was right there front and center—but if you were to look back on how January 6 was framed and understood, both by the media and subsequently by the investigation, race is a distant, jumbled, barely legible piece of that tragedy.

If that continues, there is no way we are going to be able to recover all that we have lost. The right knows that. The problem is that moderates, liberals and progressives don't know that. That's, again, the reason behind the report.

JJ: Just a few days ago, Donald Trump was mouthing off ([link removed]) in Pennsylvania, and saying:

We only take people from shithole countries. Why can't we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few from Denmark? Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people. But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.

Now, I mean, OK, if you are not living under a rock, you know that Trump and MAGA are engaged in ethnic cleansing ([link removed]) in this country. They want a white, Christian nation, and they want everyone else out, in one way or another. I don't know how to say it more simply. But what I want to say is, if you are trying to push for that kind of future, it is crucially important in your program to make sure that nobody knows the history, or that nobody believes the history. And this is another part of the work that Policy Forum does in general, and that this report talks about, that erasure of history.
Nation: The Far Right’s Plan to Force Teachers to Lie About Race

The Nation (1/15/25 ([link removed]) )

KC: And this is precisely why the administration has gone after memory, they've gone after artifacts ([link removed]) , they've gone after books ([link removed]) , they've gone after course curricula ([link removed]) , they've gone after concepts ([link removed]) , and they've gone after museums ([link removed]) . The history is the narrative. It tells us what is at stake. It tells us the destruction that has been wrought under the frames of white supremacy, under the frames of exclusion. If you don't have that history, then you cannot fully understand and read what is happening now. They know that. That is why they do what they do. But again, you have mainstream politics, you have
the media that look at race as something of the past, that can be buried in the past.

There are so few ways of, and legitimate ways, of calling out racism, so that Trump can say something clearly racist. And, at best, people will say “controversial comments ([link removed]) ” or “racially charged comments ([link removed]) .” No, this is racist, pure and simple, doing the political work that racism has always done.

We may not know it, and be able to talk about it, because there's been an agenda to erase our capacity to name that reality. And the clear fact is that you cannot change or transform a reality that you cannot name, you cannot historicize, you cannot conceptualize.

That is the secret behind the bans, behind the purging, behind the elimination of words that can no longer be used. Where are the troops? Where are the forces? Where are those who say, “This is censorship that is designed to create an authoritarian condition of possibility”? The reason we believe that so much of that remains unsaid is because, at its initial moments, it's encloaked in anti-Blackness, and we've already decided that that's something that will not be talked about. These are the consequences of that erasure.

JJ: We've been speaking with Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. She's a law professor and author at Columbia Law School and UCLA and also co-founder and director of the African American Policy Forum. They're online at AAPF.org ([link removed]) .

Thank you so much, Kimberlé Crenshaw, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

KC: Thank you so much, Janine.


Read more ([link removed])

Share this post: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Twitter"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Twitter" alt="Twitter" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Facebook"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Facebook" alt="Facebook" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Pinterest"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Pinterest" alt="Pinterest" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="LinkedIn"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="LinkedIn" alt="LinkedIn" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Google Plus"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Google Plus" alt="Google Plus" class="mc-share"></a>
<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="[link removed]" title="Instapaper"><img border="0" height="15" width="15" src="[link removed]" title="Instapaper" alt="Instapaper" class="mc-share"></a>
​

© 2021 Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you signed up for email alerts from
Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

Our mailing address is:
FAIRNESS & ACCURACY IN REPORTING
124 W. 30th Street, Suite 201
New York, NY 10001

FAIR's Website ([link removed])

FAIR counts on your support to do this work — please donate today ([link removed]) .

Follow us on Twitter ([link removed]) | Friend us on Facebook ([link removed])

change your preferences ([link removed])
Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp
[link removed]
unsubscribe ([link removed]) .