Back in 2003, when Kamala Harris was first running for office in San Francisco, she wasn’t just battling Terence Hallinan, the erratic, older white guy who’d served as district attorney for eight years (and been her boss for 18 or so miserable months). She was running against the city’s powerful Democratic machine.

To win, Harris had to pull together her own support system—a network of accomplished and well-connected friends who were passionate, and practical, about helping women get elected. One of those early boosters was Andrea Dew Steele, a Hillary Clinton ally and former Capitol Hill staffer who had recently moved to San Francisco. Her dismay at how few women held local office in the early 2000s led her to co-found a training program for women candidates called Emerge California, and a few years later, a national version, Emerge America.

“The minute I met Kamala I thought she should run for office,” Steele told me back in 2007 when I was interviewing her for a profile of Harris. “She is extremely smart and very good on the policy side, but also, such a charismatic person.” But Harris needed convincing. “Men wake up in the morning and they think, ‘Well, I think I’ll run for president,’” Steele said. “Women need to be cajoled and encouraged. And they need training.” Once she was in, Harris proved to be an extraordinarily quick study, honing a clear message, raising lots of money, and winning over some influential pols (including US Senator Dianne Feinstein but not House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a machine stalwart and Hallinan loyalist). After starting the race with just 6 percent name recognition, Harris went on to trounce her old boss with 56 percent of the vote.

“Men wake up in the morning and they think, ‘Well, I think I’ll run for president.’ Women need to be cajoled and encouraged. And they need training.”

That 2003 race was a proof of concept. Twenty years later, Emerge (as it’s known today) and its state affiliates have helped elect more than 1,200 Democratic women currently in office, including two governors, two lieutenant governors, and eight members of Congress. For 2023 races, Emerge claims a 74 percent win rate—nearly 250 alums elected; this November, more than 600 alums are on the ballot. Steele, a social entrepreneur and philanthropic advisor, is now an Emerge emeritus; the organization’s current leadership reflects what it calls the New American Majority—an increasingly diverse and youthful electorate that Harris herself embodies. “I don’t think we’re surprised to see the original Emerge woman at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket,” says A’shanti Gholar, Emerge’s president since 2020. “It is such an exciting moment.” 

But mixed with the exhilaration is also frustration with the racism and sexism that permeate politics and the media. Plus a serious concern with escalating and seemingly pervasive disinformation, which Gholar says, “really spikes when it comes to women candidates,” from the nation’s highest office to down-ballot races. Now, with Harris enjoying a historic candidacy, I was curious to learn more about how Emerge has evolved over these last two decades and what it is doing to make good on its mission of “creating a world where there are no more firsts”—where Black, brown and Indigenous women, young women, unmarried women, and LGBTQ women routinely run for office and win. I spoke with Gholar from her Washington, DC, base. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Both Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein—two of the most iconic women politicians of their era—came from San Francisco. But, the city’s Democratic power structure was dominated by men. What kind of hurdles did Harris face in taking that on?

People think, “Oh, San Francisco, it’s a Democratic city. There’s going to be lots of women in politics and expertise to tap into.” But that wasn’t the case when the vice president was starting out, and there was no place for them to go to get those basics of what it takes to run for office. It’s why our co-founders created Emerge. They were learning, right along with Kamala Harris: how to write a good bio. You have to put your contacts in order. You have to do the canvassing. You have to hustle.

Twenty years later, in most parts of this country, women candidates still seem to be outsiders.

Even in blue states, there are still so many offices where a woman has never been elected, a woman of color has never been elected, an LGBTQ person has never been elected. I say our work at Emerge has no end date because there are still a lot of good women that we need to get in office. 

Thinking back to that first Harris campaign, and then fast forwarding to today, what are the most important things you’re trying to give women candidates? Where do you start?

One of the reasons the vice president was able to be so successful was that she had that network of support with her throughout the campaign. From day one, a huge part of Emerge’s training program is making sure that women are not alone when they’re doing this. From the minute you join the program, we are with you throughout your whole journey. From being in the classroom where we’re demystifying what it takes to run for office, to when you put your name on the ballot, to when you are elected and wanting to run for higher office, we continue to give you those tools, those skills, that support that you need to be a great candidate and a great elected official.  

The core Emerge programs include a six-month training for newcomers and “boot camps” for women who are actually running. What do they consist of? I’ve heard they’re really intense.

A key part of our training is that participants are in a room with like-minded women who want to run for office, who have the same goals, the same values. It creates that sisterhood that is so important. 

We also want to get them into the immediate mindset of, “Yes, you.” We start the first day by saying, your candidacy begins today, and really getting the women to start to see themselves as candidates, as future elected officials, and honing in on their “why.” For most women who run for office, there’s a singular “why” that drives them.

We then get down to, OK, how do you put your name on the ballot? How do you hire campaign staff? How do you fundraise? How do you do public speaking, debates, canvassing, phone banking— everything that you need to know, going through that very intensively. It’s not “OK, Phone banking 101.” It’s, “How do you run an effective phone bank? What are the different scripts that you need based upon the voters in your community?” A big piece is, calculating your win rate—what are the number of votes that you need to win? And helping build that campaign and their overall operation to be a great candidate.

So many of our alums say, “There’s no way I would have won if I didn’t do Emerge.” We’ve had alums who said, “I literally thought campaigning was going to be me canvassing in my heels, in a suit, because I still had to look professional.” And we’re like, “Please don’t do that!”  

Campaigning in heels sounds extremely painful!

One of the most important things we impart to our alums is to be authentic. You don’t have to change who you are in order to get people to vote for you and to get elected. We see that with Vice President Harris. She has an authenticity that is showing through. Be true to you, because if you’re not comfortable in your skin, that’s going to show. Especially in this day and age, people feel like so many of their elected officials have failed them. Candidates who are from the community, who have the same shared experiences, who want to do good work—those are the candidates that people are looking for. 

“Be true to you, because if you’re not comfortable in your skin, that’s going to show. Especially in this day and age, people feel like so many of their elected officials have failed them.”

You also mentioned hustle. In some quarters, it could have a bit of a negative connotation— “Oh, Harris is just hustling us.”

There’s a story the vice president told at our annual meeting this year that I love. She talked about putting her ironing board in her car and then setting up the ironing board at the grocery store—during that first campaign, that was her table. She was very grassroots; she had good hustle. I think that is something that we will continue to see from her.

You gotta be scrappy. I’ll take this from the fundraising point of view. We know that women candidates, especially first-time candidates, will almost always get heavily outspent. And we say, what you don’t have in money, you make up with in shoe leather and a good message. It’s putting your ironing board in the backseat of the car. Contacting that friend who is a great cook and asking them to do the catering for your event. It’s throwing house parties in the backyard to create an intimate environment. Just you DM-ing that local reporter saying, “Hey, do you want to come to my home, sit on my couch, and talk about my race?” Because that can lead to good press. Our alums regularly beat those smooth, “I-got-tons-of-consultants” type of candidates with their scrappiness and their hustle.

A lot of people are really surprised by how well Harris has been doing since The Big Switch. You hear all the time, “She doesn’t seem like the same candidate she was in 2019, or 2020.” And, “Where did she learn to give speeches like this?”

The person we see now is who the vice president has always been. I think that some people don’t want to recognize it, they don’t want to see it, and that’s something that we’re also very honest about. We tell our alums, “You’re not going to be for everyone.” 

We also have to look at the role that the media plays in shaping the narrative about women candidates. I mean, there can be a race full of women, and they will somehow find ways to make the article about what they wore and not their policies. We see it all the time. We’ll hear, “Those men are running for the same seat.” But the women, “They’re running against each other.” We can have multiple men, but, why do there need to be multiple women? Why do there need to be two Latino women?

I’m very honest in telling our alums: We can teach them how to be confident on the campaign trail. We can make it a lot less lonely when they’re running for office. But we can’t take away racism and misogyny. At the same time, every time a woman puts her name on the ballot, every time a woman is elected, we are changing that narrative. When you see multiple women running for the same position, we’re normalizing that. 

Another frequent complaint from journalists: Why hasn’t Harris done any press conferences? Why won’t she sit down for more interviews? 

The reality is, we know that the vice president has done interviews before. There have been lengthy articles about her. It goes back to the whole media narrative: “Where’s Kamala? What’s Kamala doing?” My response is, “Everything and everywhere!” I get the e-mails from her team, and reading her daily schedule makes me exhausted. 

They’re not avoiding the press, they’re being thoughtful about it. Frankly, they should be thoughtful because it’s a coveted interview—she is the prize. I say, take your time and do it right. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. 

When she did finally sit down with CNN, how do you think it went?

It was more about asking her to respond to a lot of the things that we have been hearing on the right from Donald Trump, and not a lot about her vision, how she’s going to govern. I felt it could have been a lot more forward-looking. That question about her ethnicity—“They’re saying you aren’t Black enough, you’re not Indian enough”—was that really something they needed to ask her? She gave the perfect response. But why are we constantly asking women to defend who we are?

As you see the candidate Harris has become, is there something she does that you wish you could bottle and hand out to all your Emerge candidates? 

I actually will take this back to the vice presidential debate in 2020. It was her being there in her power. She let Mike Pence be Mike Pence, just like I expect she’s going to let Donald Trump be Donald Trump when they debate. And she’s going to focus on answering the questions about the real issues and talking about why she is the perfect candidate for this moment.

It’s what I love about her, something that women are seeing on the campaign trail and that little girls are seeing as they grow up. People are trying to diminish her, but she is not letting that happen. She is keeping that energy going and not letting the negativity seep in. Because the negativity, the racism, the sexism are all a part of wanting to scare us into not wanting to run for office and not making change. When she says, “You do not let people tell you who you are—you show them who you are,” it is such a masterclass in leadership and women owning their power.

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It’s fair to say that Michelle Obama stole the show at the Democratic Convention on Tuesday. (Husband Barack was on point in noting how hard an act she was to follow.) And to a journalist like me who covers wealth and inequality, one line in particular stood out. Listen:

Michelle Obama: She understands that most of us will never be afforded the grace of failing forward. We will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth. pic.twitter.com/ywBjdwZl3E

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 21, 2024

The affirmative action of generational wealth. That’s a smart reframing of a longtime conservative hobby horse.

Republican politicians and right-wing media have regularly attacked programs designed to counter the generational impacts of government-sanctioned discrimination in housing, education, and veterans benefits. Now they’re targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—see JD Vance’s recently introduced “Dismantle DEI Act“—and trying to brand Kamala Harris a “DEI hire.” That’s a laughable assertion. (New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen argues that the moniker applies more aptly to Vance.)

But the critics of DEI and affirmative action want to have their cake and eat it too. For example, if you, like our Supreme Court, think the use of race as a factor in college admissions should be illegal, that’s your prerogative. But I hope you are similarly inclined to outlaw the practice of elite colleges giving an admissions boost to children of alumni and to students (like Jared Kushner) whose parents are major donors. Because isn’t that, too, a kind of affirmative action?

In just a handful of words, Michelle Obama managed to convey a simple truth, says Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think tank that focuses on the racial wealth-and-opportunity gap: “It is not those asking to break up concentrated wealth and opportunity that are asking for an unfair advantage, but rather those who are hoarding concentrated wealth.”

“Most of us,” as Obama noted, “will never benefit” from generational wealth. And that’s true of everyone, but even truer when you are Black or Hispanic. In the Federal Reserve Board’s 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF)*, about 47 percent of white respondents said they’d either received an inheritance or expected to receive one. Their median inheritance expected was $195,500 (in 2019 dollars).

Only 16 percent of Black respondents had received or expected an inheritance—and their median expectation was about half the white figure. Less than 12 percent of Hispanic respondents had received or expected an inheritance.

The disparities are similar when you look at federally subsidized retirement savings, which, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), will cost US taxpayers a whopping $1.9 trillion from 2020-2024. Most of that cash goes to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, who tend to be, yep, pretty white.

In 2021, the JCT identified 8,000 Americans with Individual Retirement Account (IRA) balances in excess of $5 million who were still getting tax breaks for their annual contributions—which is “shocking but not surprising,” noted Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden. Peter Thiel, ProPublica reported, even managed, using questionable tactics, to amass a Roth IRA worth $5 billion.

Affirmative action for the rich.

According to the latest (2022) SCF, only 35 percent of Black families and less than 28 percent of Hispanic households even had a retirement account, compared with 62 percent of white families. The accounts of those white families were worth over $380,000 on average, more than triple the Black and Hispanic savings—and again, these numbers don’t account for the fact that a large majority of Black and Hispanic households have no private retirement accounts at all.

Then there’s land ownership—see “40 Acres and a Lie,” our acclaimed multimedia package exploring how the few Black families who received land reparations after the Civil War then had their acres cruelly rescinded a year and a half later. And consider these passages on the Homestead Acts, from a chapter of my 2021 book, Jackpot, titled “Thriving While Black.”

The two acts, passed during and after the Civil War, granted 160-acre parcels of public land—a foundation for generational wealth—to families willing to stake out the plots and make improvements. But the timing and circumstances made it extraordinarily difficult for Black Americans to participate:

It was a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza for white fortune-seekers. “The acquisition of property was the key to moving upward from a low to a higher stratum,” wrote author Everett Dick. “The property holder could vote and hold office, but the man with no property was practically on the same political level as the indentured servant or slave.” […]

Between the two acts, about 270 million acres of farmland—14 percent of the total landmass of the continental United States—was granted to 1.6 million white families, but only 4,000 to 5,000 Black families. [University of Michigan professor Trina] Shanks calculates that more than 48 million living Americans are direct descendants of those Homestead Act beneficiaries. Which means there’s a greater than one-in-four chance your forebears benefited directly from the biggest public-to-private wealth transfer in American history—if you’re white, that is. 

Affirmative action for the rich.

Obama hit the nail on the head. Asante-Muhammad says he was struck by her simple acknowledgement “that affirmative action for the privileged happens,” though “I wish there could have been a follow up to re-emphasize why programmatic affirmative action to advance more equal opportunity is necessary.”

But “it felt good,” he adds, “to hear a political speech that connects so personally with my political ideals, and to the challenges of the racial wealth divide and the action and ideals needed to bridge it.” 

*I used 2019 numbers here because the 2022 inheritance data was only available in raw form.

Just a few (long) weeks ago, President Joe Biden was still running for reelection, grappling with persistently negative polling. One major concern for Democrats—and a source of surprise and delight for Republicans—was the apparent shift of young Black male voters towards former President Donald Trump. This will-they-won’t-they question dominated the summer, culminating at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in mid-July: Could Trump make significant inroads into a voting bloc that traditionally supported Democrats?

That narrative shifted dramatically with the entry of Vice President Kamala Harris into the race. Suddenly, a much higher percentage of Black voters told pollsters of their intent to vote, a big increase from July when Biden was still on the ticket. “I seem to be doing very well with Black males,” Trump mused during a televised press conference at Mar-a-Lago last week, without citing evidence. “And I still am.” But he also seemed spooked: “It could be that I’ll be affected somewhat with Black females.”

When the Mother Jones team reported from the RNC last month, I went on a mission to unravel these complex cross-currents of identity, policy, and political strategy. “I learned a lot about Black Republicans during these conversations—their motivations, their stories, their goals,” I recall, in a new, in-depth video showcasing several substantive interviews with Black convention attendees. “I wanted to know what draws a Black person to identify with this Republican Party.”

I uncovered old-school appeals to rugged individualism (with elements of historical revisionism), traditional anti-abortion viewpoints, and a rejection of government interventions. Ultimately, I discovered that—for a party that so openly courts racists and racism enablers—having more Black people in the ranks could be, surprisingly, beneficial: “The only way the Republican Party becomes this ideologically conservative but racially inclusive big tent party,” I conclude, “is if there is a fundamental rejection of the people, policies, and practices they currently hold as sacred in their political vision.”

Update: On Tuesday, Attorney Ben Crump announced that the Department of Justice will be investigating the death of Sonya Massey, who was shot and killed by a former Illinois sheriff’s deputy earlier this month. 

“We don’t know what the scope is. We just know they’ve opened an investigation file on Sonya Massey,” said Crump in a press conference. “Obviously, with the family’s guidance, if the family wants them to go deeper, we’re going to advocate for them to go deeper.”

On Monday, an Illinois county sheriff’s department released body camera footage showing the fatal shooting of a Black woman who originally called 911 for help. Earlier this month, Deputy Sean Grayson shot 36-year-old Sonya Massey after she attempted to move a pot of water off of her stove at the officer’s behest.

The Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office has reportedly fired Grayson, who was later charged with first-degree murder last week. He’s pleaded not guilty.

“She needed a helping hand,” attorney Ben Crump said at a press conference on Monday. “She didn’t need a bullet to the face.” On July 6, Massey reportedly called the authorities about a potential prowler around her Springfield home. Officer Grayson and another deputy arrived on the scene.

While asking her a few questions, Grayson asked her to turn off her stove, where a pot of water was reportedly boiling. Massey gets up to turn it off and pick up the pot. The officers then step back. She asks where they’re going; Grayson replies, “Away from your hot steaming water.”

Massey then says, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” Grayson responds that she “better not,” threatening to shoot her “in her fucking face.” She apologizes before three shots ring in the air.

As Massey laid bleeding in her kitchen, the other unnamed officer said he was going to get his medical kit from his car when Grayson said, “Nah, she’s done. You can go get it, but that’s a headshot.”

Following the shooting, the 30-year-old deputy referred to Massey as a “crazy fucking bitch” to other officers who arrived on the scene. Grayson’s body camera was reportedly turned off for most of the shooting.

The footage of Massey’s death, captured by the other deputy’s body camera, shocked the nation. Several local, state, and federal officials have condemned the officer’s actions. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris both released statements calling for justice for Massey’s family on Tuesday.

“Sonya Massey deserved to be safe,” said Harris. “After she called the police for help, she was tragically killed in her own home at the hands of a responding officer sworn to protect and serve.”

In an interview with CNN, her father, James Wilburn, alleged that law enforcement had given them conflicting information about his daughter’s death, leading him to believe that a robber had killed her. Massey’s killing has devastated him.

“Sonya was a daddy’s girl. She never ended a conversation—whether by text or telephone or in person—without saying, ‘Daddy, I love you,” her father, James Wilburn, told CNN’s Laura Coates in an interview. “And that’s the last message I have from my daughter that’s saved on my voicemail, was ‘Daddy, I love you.'”

When police kill someone, a medical examiner lists their cause of death—which plays a significant role in whether a police officer will be held accountable.

Some of those determinations shield the police from potential accountability: notably, “excited delirium,” a so-called syndrome not recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the International Classification of Diseases, with research finding that most deaths attributed to the term involve aggressive restraint.

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, a professor of American studies at Princeton University, traces the history of “excited delirium” in a new book, Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease—and calls it a “very useful tool that has allowed medical examiners to participate in these cover-ups.”

Beliso-De Jesús spoke to me about the racist and xenophobic views behind the term, the devastating impact of its pseudoscience on the families of the deceased, and what has to be done to move forward.

Forensic pathologist Charles Wetli first used the concept of “excited delirium” in dismissing the deaths of Black sex workers in the 1980s; they were later found to have been murdered by a serial killer. Does the term’s origin speak to its being dehumanizing? 

Medical diagnoses are supposed to be helpful to people. But as we can see in the example of excited delirium, and specifically with the misdiagnosis of the cases that you’re referring to—the misdiagnosis of Black women who were strangled to death, murdered and raped by a serial killer—which Charles Wetli described as “cocaine sex deaths,” this horrific term was really used for him to substantiate his argument.

He used these Black women’s deaths to sort of make the argument that Black people, who he saw as a species that was separate from white people, had a specific genetic flaw [causing them] to die spontaneously.

He argued Black women died through small amounts of cocaine use and sexual activity, which he assumed or presumed to be consensual. Then he argued that Black men died spontaneously around police officers. This reveals so much dehumanization.

How did Wetli use and misconstrue Afro-Latine religions in rationalizing excited delirium? 

The relationship between Wetli’s research on Afro-Cubans and cocaine and “excited delirium syndrome” is not direct or obvious, but I think it’s much more subtle and ingrained. So this is the 1980s, during the Mariel Boatlift, when 125,000 Cubans arrived as refugees in Miami—and those Cubans that arrive are darker, poorer and less well or less resourced than the previous generations of Cubans, who were whiter and wealthier.

Wetli was in his first couple of years as the new assistant medical examiner, and at the same time, there was a mass criminalization of this community. You see it in stereotypes like the famous Tony Montana from Scarface, who is this sweaty, aggravated, sexual predator mobster who is addicted to cocaine and murder.

Charles Wetli’s research on Afro-Cubans and cocaine, particularly on the tattoos of Afro-Cubans, is a participation in this longer criminalization of Afro-Cuban religions. He has this hobby where he claims himself as an expert on Afro-Caribbean religions, or cults, as he calls them.

He’s saying that, basically, mostly Black and Latino men have this tendency to become aggressive, sweaty, and overheated—essentially just self-combusting as a result of their aggressiveness. And as a result, he argues, they die, and police witness their deaths. It becomes a pattern with the Afro-Cubans he’s studying, where he blames the religion and the Cubans as these aggressive criminals, almost a plague infection into the United States.

How has the label of “excited delirium” in the killing of Black people by police been used to underplay how lethal other forms of police violence can be, such as the use of tasers?

Excited delirium has allowed for certain deaths to go under the radar for so long. With shootings, it’s very clear what the cause of death was. But for many years, with this term, these deaths have been completely ignored.

What excited delirium does is say that the person’s own behavior— cocaine use or hyper-masculinity, aggressiveness—leads to their death. As a result, there’s a very frightening, medicalized cover-up of police violence. If it hadn’t been for footage of George Floyd’s death, many people would have taken for granted the initial argument: that he was simply a man who died under medical distress. That was what [Minneapolis police] had posted when his death first occurred. Without the bystander video, there really would have been no way for the world to have known that this was someone who was essentially murdered in plain sight.

Was there anything that stood out to you in conversations with family members of people whose deaths were labeled as excited delirium?

For a lot of the family members I spoke with, there is a sense of relief—because for many years, people were blaming the victims. A family I interviewed was told that their father just suddenly up and died during a police car chase, that it was his drug use, and his heart had just self-combusted. There were other stories that maybe the police had pushed him off the road. Questions around that completely got erased by the narrative.

These people who are labeled as dying by “excited delirium” are often seen as written off by society, similar to the way that the Black women who were murdered and raped were written off as so-called “crack whores.” That weaponization [of the term] by police justified blaming the victims, and in many [cases], created a buffer for police and medical doctors to work together to write off whole communities.

The American Medical Association came out against “excited delirium” in 2021. What do you think would need to change for its racist pseudoscience to be discarded?

I’m really glad to see that there have been many people, many organizations, many states, actively working against excited delirium right now. I think it’s [a trend] that grew out of the post-2020 uprising of people coming together and recognizing systemic police violence.

That practice has not gone away simply because people don’t use the term any longer. People are still being tased and asphyxiated. Police officers are putting their weight on people’s bodies, putting them into chokeholds; people are complaining of not being able to breathe, and then ultimately dying. Medical examiners and coroners are still using the same kinds of medical justifications, like heart failure and drug use, rather than acknowledging the role of police violence in these deaths.

We have to continue to ensure that we don’t just focus solely on this term, but on the broader structure of policing in the country and how these two institutions—medical institutions, police institutions—are tied together.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.