Racially Segregated Campaign Calls Are Gross

We’ve all had fun mocking the Harris campaign’s “White Dudes for Kamala” call, but, at the risk of prizing us all from our levity, I’d like to accompany that mockery with another, more serious observation about this trend that ought not be lost in the mêlée: It’s gross.

As a matter of fact, it’s worse than gross: It’s the sort of divisive behavior that Americans ought to avoid at all costs. I know that there are quite a lot of people within our elite institutions who believe that treating people differently based on the color of their skin is fine if the right people are doing it for the right reasons. But the thing is: those people are wrong. They are wrong when the issue is affirmative action in colleges. They are wrong when the issue is Department of Commerce loans. They are wrong when the issue is racially segregated campus events. They are wrong when the issue is “sensitivity training.” And they are wrong here. The problem with dividing people up by their color lies in the dividing people up by their color, not in the argument being made in its favor. Irrespective of its source, we ought to discourage the practice as emphatically as we can.

On last week’s “White Woman for Kamala” call, a woman named Arielle Fodor told her fellow participants that, “as White women, we need to use our privilege to make positive changes. 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.”

This, to put it mildly, is revolting. There is nothing special about either “BIPOC individuals” or non-BIPOC individuals, and there is certainly no reason for us to treat either of them as a monolithic group. To establish rules that exempt a given sort of person from being talked over or corrected is to reject the premise of equality, to signal that you do not care at all about the details of what is being argued or conveyed, and to admit that, despite your protestations, your political interests stop at the immutable characteristics of the people involved. That Arielle Fodor made the request that she did tells us a lot about how she sees the world, but more important than that is what the incident tells us about what will inevitably start to happen once you begin segregating people by race. By design, the establishment of a separate phone call for white women turns everyone else into the Other. And once that Other has been established, the generalizations will follow.

The best way to avoid that? Don’t do it in the first place.