Karine Jean-Pierre, who served as press secretary in the Biden administration, is doing a round of interviews to plug her new book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines. It’s been a disaster. In conversations with MSNBC and The New Yorker, she sidestepped questions of whether Biden’s ironclad support for Israel amid its destruction of Gaza was appropriate, and if she was confident that the president could have governed effectively through January 2029. Instead of answering clearly, she repeatedly invoked her identities. “I woke up every day as a Black woman who is queer; no one had ever seen someone like me at that podium, standing behind that lectern, it was an honor and a privilege to have that job,” Jean-Pierre said when asked by MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin if she regretted anything she had said as White House press secretary.
Hmmmm. I don’t want to spend much time bashing Jean-Pierre. She didn’t have a lot of actual power in the Biden White House and is unlikely to be a major figure in Democratic politics in the future, especially since she has bizarrely opted to leave the party and become an independent, in part because she feels Democrats were too mean to Biden after his dismal debate performance.
But Jean-Pierre’s comments fit into an important discourse happening in the Democratic Party and the broader left about how liberals should deal with gender, sexual orientation, race, and other such fraught issues. It is vital that liberals continue to forcefully address and defend causes such as transgender and abortion rights. At the same time, they should move on from the kind of narrow, elite politics that Jean-Pierre is practicing.
We need less focus on the plight of a few people from marginalized groups getting or staying in very prestigious, elite jobs. This is a tricky issue because I do think representation in high places matters. It’s almost certainly the case that female politicians as a group push harder for policies such as family leave and gender pay equity than their male counterparts. Prominent Black journalists like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones have played essential roles in reminding the nation that racial inequality in America remains deep and harms African Americans in a myriad of ways. We celebrate Barack Obama becoming president, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris winning presidential nominations, and Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joining the Supreme Court because people with those identities faced such strong discrimination for much of American history that they previously couldn’t serve in those positions.
But the fame, power, and sometimes financial windfall from these jobs goes to those individuals, not the broader communities that they come from. Because of the Great Recession and the slow recovery, many Black Americans were worse off economically after Obama left office than when he entered the White House. And these individuals are not required to, and in some ways have incentives not to, advance the interests of the groups they purportedly represent. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement emerged in part because of a feeling that Obama, trying to represent the entire country and not get tagged as the “Black president,” was even more constrained in addressing racial issues than a white Democratic president may have been. Likewise there is tension between Representative Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress, and transgender activists, and that’s not surprising. The congresswoman is representing Delaware residents and the Democratic Party in a way that transgender activists are not.
With Jean-Pierre, these points are obvious. I’m not aware of any evidence that she played a large role in shaping policies that benefited Black people, women, or those from the LBGTQ community while in the Biden administration. (Press secretaries have very limited policy portfolios.) She was perhaps best known for defending Biden’s Israel-Palestinian policies, which many liberals rightly feel were unfairly tilted against a group (Palestinians) whose plight in some ways resembles that of Black Americans in the United States. So when Jean-Pierre invokes her statuses as Black, female, and queer to duck criticism of her actions, it feels evasive and manipulative. At least in these interviews, she isn’t invoking her identities to promote those broader groups, but simply in service of herself.
Let me not ignore the elephant in the room as we discuss women of color and the failings of the Biden administration: Kamala Harris. She’s a more complicated case than Jean-Pierre. It made sense for Biden to choose Harris as his running mate—she balanced the ticket in the way that Biden had for Obama 12 years earlier. She was a strong advocate for minority and female causes within the administration. And Black women have been excluded from American politics—we’ve never even had a Black female governor. Not one.
At the same time, a Vice President Elizabeth Warren might have done more than Harris inside the White House to advance progressive economic policies that benefit low-income people of all races. And Harris’s lackluster political skills meant she might lose to the Republicans if she were to end up being the Democratic nominee in 2024—a loss that would set back a myriad of marginalized groups.
The 2024 defeat was much more about inflation, anti-incumbent sentiment, and Biden than Harris. That said, the discourse in the summer of 2024, that Democrats just could not pass over their Black female vice president, was frustrating. It was also predictable and preventable.
In February 2023, I advocated for Biden announcing then he would not seek a second term, allowing Democrats to have an open primary. If Harris won, she would have done so because she showed strong political skills. If she lost a primary in a party where about 20 percent of voters are Black, it would be hard to claim that the interests of Black Democrats were being ignored in the process.
Overall, what we must guard against is what Georgetown University professor Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò describes as “elite capture,” where the goals of minority groups are subsumed by the goals of a few elite members of those groups. That doesn’t mean that race, sexual orientation, gender, religion, or other factors don’t matter. It doesn’t mean we should get rid of the Congressional Black Caucus or diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. It means making sure that the elites of a group are representing that group’s interests and not simply their own.
So it’s good that liberals are reevaluating and reconsidering comments like Jean-Pierre’s. But there’s another reckoning in the party that is happening, and it’s wrongheaded. Centrist Democrats are arguing that liberals went too far in the 2010s in embracing causes such as reparations to the descendants of people who were enslaved, the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the reallocation of funding from police to social services, and greater acceptance of transgender people. There are calls for Democrats to either not discuss more liberal stances on these issues or actively move to the right on them.
In terms of electoral politics, perhaps some Democratic politicians went beyond where their constituents were, although Democrats running nationally and in purple states rarely ran on these stances and at times outright rejected them, so I am not sure how much electoral effect they could have had. But these issues, while also touching on race and gender, are much different from the identities of the person serving as White House press secretary. Police brutality, overly aggressive ICE raids, limits on transgender rights, the low levels of wealth many Black families have, in part because of redlining, and other such matters affect large swaths of people, particularly those with lower incomes. These are not debates over which elites hold which jobs.
You don’t have to agree with reparations as the solution to agree that reparations seek to address a much broader problem than whether Harris or Gretchen Whitmer was the Democratic nominee in 2024. I intentionally try to avoid phrases such as identity politics, wokeness, social issues, and cultural issues because they are often vague and misleading. Abortion and immigration can have huge effects on a person’s economic circumstances; voting rights and democracy are put in the “social” box as if they are unimportant.
But to speak in those terms briefly, identity politics that addresses particular needs or concerns of broader groups and communities should be robustly defended; identity politics that defends individuals from marginalized communities being in key elite roles should be defended in a more careful, case-by-case way. The biggest problem with Trump trying to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve is that it’s an authoritarian move, not that she’s a Black woman. It’s bad that one Black woman might be off the Fed; it’s even worse that Black women across the country have lost their jobs since Trump became president.
Zohran Mamdani is setting a good example for how to do politics on these kinds of issues. I’m excited that America’s biggest and most influential city could have a Muslim mayor for the first time. But Mamdani has not leaned into that personal aspect of his candidacy. At the same time, he has not ignored issues that particularly affect marginalized groups. He has sharply criticized Israel’s war in Gaza, slammed ICE for its cruel treatment of immigrants in New York, and promised to defend the rights of transgender New Yorkers. At the same time, there are strongly pro-Israel voices in New York politics very opposed to him, and that’s a fine form of identity politics too, except those slamming him simply for being Muslim.
The obvious lesson from Jean-Pierre is that if you spent a year on TV legitimizing the mass killing of civilians, don’t try to exonerate yourself by noting that you are Black, female, and gay. It will make you seem like an actual villain, as opposed to what I suspect she really is, a decent person who clung to a powerful job at all costs. But there are lessons that are more nuanced and complicated from the firestorm over her remarks. We really should celebrate the inclusion of a few more people from marginalized groups into our top institutions and jobs. That’s important. But our North Star must be justice and liberation for the many in those groups.