Rebecca Traister
Appearances
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
I don't want to sort of force this question on Brittany, but Brittany's work in particular, her academic work about the generation, she's one of the first people whose work I read who made me think about in real time what it is like to be born in a period where your trajectory is backward.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Because we always, we tell a very neat story about the United States in forward motion in which we have just gotten... freer and more equal and better and things have gotten better and the arc of the moral universe has bent toward justice. But we lose so much when we don't look at the periods where in fact things have moved exactly backwards.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And Britney's academic work, which is very tied to, but distinct from her contemporary political commentary, Traces the generation of black women who were born in an era and whose lifetimes were by the time they were adults, they had fewer rights and freedoms than when they were born.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And so I think of that as like a period that is analogous to where we are right now in a very real and meaningful way. Yeah.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
But this is what you just described that the failure I want to I want to take this. I hope I can make this make sense. What you just described about the resistance to pretending that this thing hasn't happened to being like, no, that can't have happened. I would say that that describes exactly where our current victors, right? The American right.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
I don't even want to talk about this in partisan terms, Republicans and Democrats. I want to talk about like the American right, the ascendant, like backlash, white supremacist, hetero masculinity, blah, blah, blah, right? That whole thing, the punitive, whatever. What you just described, which was the refusing to acknowledge the victories and just complaining, whining, this was unfair.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
That actually describes, I mean, we could do this on any kind of scale, the last 50 to 70 years of the American right. And everything that I heard in that Hegseth room that I hear is actually... just bitching and moaning about losses that occurred in the middle of the last century that they have never gotten over. And then they haven't actually learned how to do real leadership, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
From like, whatever you want to talk about, an actual conservative point of view, a fiscally conservative point of view, even a socially conservative point of view that isn't just mired in These people can't have won inclusion in our power. The redistribution of power to people besides a certain set of wealthy, white, mostly male, right? Like that is unacceptable to us.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And we are whining about it. And I sat there through those hearings, through the hearing last week. And just, I think that stands in for a lot of the other stuff, listening to the sort of platform that these people have come to their victory on. Okay. And it is, it is not future leadership. It is not innovation. It is fury at battles that were lost several generations ago.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And that's one of the things I keep thinking about as they, you know, I listened last week to stuff about how this new it was specific to the candidate who's going to be our secretary of defense, but it was also obviously more broadly about how they want to present. I heard about a warrior ethos. There are no more soldiers.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
There are war fighters about, and like the entire argument was for this question of whether this person was going to be a qualified secretary of defense where there was no affirmative argument made about him. Truly like you can, you know, You could look at somebody like Brett Kavanaugh, who should never have been confirmed to the Supreme Court and been like, well, at least he understands law.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
I mean, you know, like badly. Like there's no like Pete Hegsath. Well, he's really good at this. There's literally no argument for him. And so the argument that was being made was that he loved Jesus and that he hated DEI. And that was the entirety of his confirmation hearing.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
But that was really instructive because it was every argument that was made for this guy was actually an argument against inclusion, against racial equality, against gender equality, against ways of looking at the world that had in any way diminished the power of the kind of person who'd had power throughout this country's history.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And so that thing that you just described about the inability to acknowledge the victor, I think begins... here with the right. And they have just extracted a victory and a real victory. And I want to also heed your advice and say, right, they won. And I think that's sort of what we're talking about, which is like, let's sit and look.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Here's where the hope and possibly a naive hope and also one that does not want to diminish. This is what I was saying at the very beginning about long term optimism, maybe a stretch, but long term hope versus short term terror and eyes open reckoning with reality.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
OK, and this is what I'm going to try to balance here, because I think Brittany's this is where we're sort of talking about the same thing, which is what is clearly what these victors are doing when I say that that they were unable to accept the defeats of the mid-20th century. This is exactly what I'm talking about.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
So they are gonna come and they're gonna beat them in all the language, man, all the language. This is, again, I'm in Hegseth world, but the torture is akin to the rape. You know, we now have affirmative action for rapists in this administration, and we only hire men who've sexually assaulted people, right? This is like a job requirement in the Trump administration, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
But think about what this has in common. The assertion of brute force- Over bodies that you want to dominate and you want to make a public show of dominating. Right. So this is rape. This is the defense of torture. This is the it's it's the attack on education.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
It is declaring there are only two genders. We're going to do this from the top down, literally, and we are going to overpower you physically. We're going to assert our rights to your bodies, okay? In a million ways. You're talking about trans identities. You're talking about reproductive realities. You're talking about incarceration, death penalty, torture, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
This is like, we are going to dominate your bodies. All right. And so that is what's happening. And I do not want when I when I say anything that is forward looking and optimistic, I do not want to take away from the brutal lived reality of this is going to be deportation, family separation, all these things in front of us now, right now.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
I also want to say that Britney's, you know, the history of what happens in the middle of the 19th century is we have a very violent war. And the sort of culmination of generations worth of activism on multiple fronts over periods of well more than a century, extracting certain liberties and certain victories from a government and a system that was designed around oppressions. And then...
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
You have the rollback of those, the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, the violent rollback, the assertion of brute force and punitive power over the bodies that had extracted certain kinds of liberties and victories, not complete ones, but you have the violent pushing of them back into boxes. And it's not, this isn't clean. They're not clean dates, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
They're not clean victories by any stretch. You have emancipation. You have the 19th Amendment, not until the beginning of the 20th century. And even then it's incomplete because it does not cover Black women who are already among those Black people who gained the right to vote, but couldn't because of Jim Crow, right? It's not clean, like Brittany was saying, but these are fuzzy borders.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And then out of that, that brutal reassertion of power over bodies that those at the top did not want to have participating in realms where they'd been previously excluded. Out of that comes the reassertion of that drive, that need, that fight from the bottom to say, actually, those victories that you tried to kill from the last century, and that you did, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Like Brittany's saying, and like what we're acknowledging. No, that's not the end of the story. You don't just get the past back without any view that there's going to be a future. And that there's going to be a future of these people at the bottom who have a will and have had a raw will. That this country began with people whose bodies were forcibly taken.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Raped, put to work, had no rights, had no voice, had no acknowledgement as full humans, could extract liberty. Horribly, horribly. That people who had no votes could extract votes. That people who had no rights to bodily autonomy could extract some legal protections for bodily autonomy. That has happened, but it's also had to happen multiple times. Right. And that's the important thing.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And so where does that situate us? It's really important. That's the long term versus the short term. It is really important to note that those women who Brittany talks about who stiffen their spines right in ways that we would prefer that we did not have to do. That the stiffening of the spines was like, nope, we have to do this process again.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
But that it has been done, not just in the last century, but the century before that, and it has been taken back. And part of what I watch when I have been still, as we talked about at the beginning of this, when I have just been sitting through it, tuning some of it out, but also not really tuning it out, like...
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
I am watching the displays, like the victory displays, the rolling around in macho, white, masculinist, brutality, grotesque, the rolling around of people who are behaving through their, like, peacocking around their domination and... brutal possibilities. They are behaving like people who aren't scared of anything. But I believe they're behaving that way because they're terrified.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And they want the people at the bottom to think that there's no hope. They want everybody, right? They're like threatening Republican politicians, like Republican senators. It's working. They're saying Elon Musk is going to point his money cannon at you if you challenge this, you know, Trump, Zuckerberg, Musk, like all these, you know, this oligarchy, broligarchy, whatever.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Like we will destroy you. We'll just destroy you. We'll destroy your political career. We'll take you out. For civilians, like there's that primary threat for actual Republican, hard right Republican politicians who would do anything to complicate their agenda. For civilians, it's much worse. We'll dox you. We'll threaten you. We'll put you in jail.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
You know, like the revenge list, all that stuff, right? You can't do anything. But why are they doing that? Why are they behaving that way? A party that actually is a party and an ideology that is actually secure in its idea that is fulfilling some the will of the people isn't so scared of the people.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
You know, they're trying to dominate the people because they're terrified of what the people actually want. And they're behaving like they have a mandate, which they do not have. Right? Remember, and this is not resisting the victory. I want to promise, this is not resisting the victory. But it is pointing out, they won. They really won through what was an electoral college landslide.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
It is also true that they won with less than half of the electorate's support. And they're behaving like that is not the case. That's true. So think about what those dynamics mean moving forward.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Well, I made some conscious plans in advance, which was to be with friends. We had house guests for the weekend and, I had dinner with friends last night. I texted with some people, including you, Brittany, a little bit. you know, couple groups that are text threads that are important to me and just the voices that, you know, the people I trust the most. And there are tons of them.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
I mean, that's one of the ways I experience all of this right now is remembering that the world is full. It's not some retreat, small club thing where just there are a few people whispering, like the world is full of people who are, um, in conversation about what to do and how to act.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Speaking of my own industry, which I feel a little alienated from right now, more than a little alienated from right now. especially around the way the political commentary is working.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And there are some examples about media caving, like talk about a news industry making it easier for these kinds of scare tactics to work and depress any kind of even storytelling, like accurate storytelling is the sort of caving on these lawsuits, making it so that these people can sue media organizations. Anyway, that's a whole other story.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
But I also want to talk about just the nature of how the media tends to cover Like this is a political story, you know, because we know that there's a tendency for political media to treat everything as a distant game, a horse race, literally, whether we're in an election cycle or not, like a who's winning, who's losing every day.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And I want to speak to what Brittany just said about these 75 year cycles, right? You know, one of these facts that gets lost that there's only one person who lived from 1848 to vote, like who was at the Seneca Falls Convention. Oh, wow. There's one person. who was still alive to cast a vote, one woman who was alive to cast a vote after the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
So I will say there were things about yesterday specifically, like I didn't expect to wake up to Cecile Richards dying on that. But, you know, like there were some things that were like, wow, you gird and then there's like a kick first thing in the morning that's not one that you saw coming that sort of throws you off.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
She was a child who was at Seneca Falls. I had her name and I don't have it now, but think about what that means generationally, right? And so you're gonna see, I already, resistance has collapsed, right? This is one of my least favorite things happening in the media right now is this notion, we're sitting here talking about pausing, resting, sitting still, listening, watching, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Not behaving the way we did, but I wanna be real clear about something. The storyline that the resistance failed last time, first of all, what is the resistance? Is it the guys like in the Mueller time t-shirts or is it people who were running for office and fundamentally changed the Democratic Party?
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Honestly, like it's the most crucial infusion of new blood and a new generation into the Democratic Party of our lifetimes, which is... process that needs to continue and is continuing. We've seen, you know, Run for Something, which is the tremendous organization that trains first-time candidates to run for office, had record number of signups in the weeks after the election in November.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
So this idea that there's just like a deadness and a passivity is not accurate. Secondly, this question of the resistance failed, is it because Trump wasn't put in jail? Because he wasn't impeached? Because the things, the systems that certain people believed were gonna save them in fact didn't save them? Okay, but that's different from saying that,
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
resistance in his first administration failed because during his first administration, you had a record-breaking 2018 where you did have this infusion of new energy, where you had AOC, you had the squad. It changed the face of American politics and was the biggest blue wave since the Nixon administration.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
That same year, you had the defeat of the attempt to overturn the ACA, which was because people on the ground went and terrified their local Republican representatives and got them to vote against ACA repeal. You had Me Too, in which really powerful, abusive people lost their jobs and their continued ability to abuse with impunity. You have seen...
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
One abortion referendum after another be won by the forces that these guys want to suppress. And yet they have won, including in red states. So I want to first of all, tell everybody to question this notion that the resistance didn't work last year, like their last time around. That's not a true story. Secondly,
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
with that view to that 75-year cycle, right, that we are talking in centuries about forward motion and pushback and forward motion and pushback. I want everybody listening to question every time they hear political media tell them that this is just not the same as last time. There's not the same spirit of resistance, okay? This is not a problem that is going to be solved
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
this week with a march, and the fact that this is not a problem that's gonna be solved because a person is yelling, especially when the other thing you're telling us is that the last time when people yelled, it didn't do anything, right? So these are part of the reason that you pause, that you take a breath, that you breathe into the stretch. is to prepare for something far longer term.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And then I didn't watch the inauguration and I didn't, you know, I read at the end of the day as I was going to bed, I read some stories about what had happened. But that was my experience of yesterday. And I want to hear what Brittany's is.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Work that you can't have the expectation is going to be finished in a week or this term or this administration or this lifetime, you know? But that doesn't mean that you're like, this is the next generation's problem either. And so it's that balancing of how do you think about time and work and effort and who's in coalition with you and what is the work to be done together.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
But very quickly, I just want to say like the number of things rolling around in my head that don't have easy answers right now that are full of contradiction is huge. And I'd love to sort of talk through some of them here.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And let me put in a plug for InWords too. InWords. Because, I mean, and this is, you know, Brittany and I basically were on a rage tour during the last administration. We both had books about women's rage. Yes. And we often were speaking together. And I think both of us got asked a lot. Versions of... What can I do?
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Maybe I got it more because often white women were my audience and a lot of them were newer to wanting to do something to begin with. And so it was like, what can I do? I'm not a protest person or what can I do? And a thing I used to say to them that this conversation has reminded me of is. is like, there is not one model at all. And it's not just like, there's not a comforting thing.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
This is an energizing thing. Fuck no, there's no one model. If everybody just liked to go to protests and felt that we wouldn't get anything done. You don't get anything done by just protesting, right? And if everybody just wanted to run for office, that would, right? So you should think well beyond it might be
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
finding a social circle that brings you in contact with new people with whom you're not going there to secretly infiltrate it to then talk about politics. But in fact, if you find that you share interests and humanity, it becomes... more available to extend through social connection, expand your own personal moral universe, right?
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And have conversations that might not be had otherwise, whether it's crocheting or gardening or whatever. But there's also this inward thing that we've touched on before. what about getting the kinds of education that they would prefer that we not get? So a thing I used to regularly tell people who were like, I don't know, I'm not good with people. I don't knock doors.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And it's like, go to a library. Right. Go find some of this history. In my book, I wrote a ton about history that I did not know as a very expensively educated person with a strong background in history and feminism and anti-racism. There is history.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
of how people in these other generations that we've been talking about today and in other periods of regress, how they worked, how they built coalitions, how they existed in the world, how they fought. And more than anything, that long view of history and understanding, yes, we have been here before. We have been in places like this and generations before us because of their willingness
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
to think creatively and connectively with other people, to talk about inequity, injustice, and to find a mode of fighting that made sense and a way to stiffen their own spines when it felt impossible, they enabled us to get here. You know, they enabled the victories that these people are now trying to and succeeding in many cases at snatching away from us. And they do not.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
That is why they're banning books. That is why they're attacking universities. They do not want the people to understand that there are millions of paths forward for us still. Even if you do not want to be extroverted in the world, it is a mode of resistance to go and read the books they don't want you to read, to go and learn about the past that they would prefer you not learn about.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And that's a very introverted path forward too.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Thank you. Thank you so much.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
So the things that I'm like, that are all knotted in my head right now are around questions of strength and weakness, long-term hope and short-term terror. Hmm. the connections around masculinity and ideas of masculinity that were being sold. the ideas of top-down power versus bottom-up power, which I think are really crucial that we empower.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
I'm just like listing the things that in my head are like the happening. And I think all these things apply to what I'm sorting.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Oh, and these questions of something Brittany and I were talking about just before we started recording is I said, I have this weird feeling that we just have to sit through this, which doesn't mean passivity and it doesn't mean not having thoughts or conversations like these and a million others and doing the work and writing and all that stuff. But there's this weird feeling of like,
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
this is like a display happening or like a temper tantrum, like a toddler, you know, like there's no... There's no succeeding in calming it right now, so you just have to sit through it, and you can choose how closely to pay attention to it or not, but it's gonna go on and there's nothing you can do. That tantrum-y thing.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
All these things, they're just knots in my brain that I'm picking apart and trying to get into some kind of shape that makes sense, and sometimes it's in my writing. My bosses at New York Magazine gave me an assignment beginning of the year to go down and cover the Hegsath confirmation, which I think was pretty brutal for me emotionally. I had a weird experience of going down.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
Brittany, you talked about crying. And as a white woman, I have a different relationship to tears. Mine can be used to draw a lot of response. But I will tell you that in a professional context, they're pretty embarrassing. A weird thing happened the first week I went down to sort of talk to senators about how they were going to game out this Hegsath confirmation. I mean,
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
You know, which is that I started I had just like water coming out of my eyes. It wasn't crying. I can't describe it. I thought it was the cold. It's the winter. I was on a plane. It was dry. But like I was going into the Senate offices and like sort of completely just being like, hi, hi, sorry, I have allergies or something. I don't know what was happening, but like I was in a steady state of.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
having wet eyes and tears rolling down my cheeks, but I was not emotionally crying. And then when I came back, so I went that first week, I wrote a story, sort of anticipatory, what are the Democrats going to do, like a Beltway story.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And then I went back and I had to sit through the confirmation hearing with Pete Hegseth, where a lot of this stuff about masculinity, strength, weakness, top down, bottom up, these things that we're talking about began to rear their heads.
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
And it was an incredibly, it was more than four hours of listening to just this incredible power play of getting this manifestly incompetent, dangerous, terrifying, menacing man through via a lot of communicative political strategizing around menace and around threat and around like that was happening both inside the room and outside the room. And it was
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
deeply unpleasant and afterwards there was a young reporter who was in the room with me who was clearly shaken and we talked a little bit and then on the on the flight home which was the next day i just started to cry on the flight for no reason there was not a conversation that preceded it i was just on a plane to go back to my house and i cried for the hour and 15 minutes that we were in flight with this poor guy next to me like what's happening with this lady
We Can Do Hard Things
Post-Inauguration Family Meeting: How We Will Get Through with Brittney Cooper & Rebecca Traister
So anyway, there's a lot of things that I just can't stop thinking about. And I don't know if some of my tears come from my own frustration at not being able to untangle them.