In this podcast episode, EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook takes a look at advocacy and elections, and how people can become more engaged in the political process.
Cook speaks with Jessa Arnold – an activist, author, educator and podcast host. Her book, “Raising Our Hands,” dives deep into conversations with white women about their identity, role in the U.S., and what can be done to help spur beneficial change.
Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.
Ken: Hi there folks, this is Ken Cook and you're tuning into another one of my episodes and I have a feeling that it's an episode many of you are experiencing right now too. This latest election cycle was heavily focused on the experiences and political issues of women. And last night, thinking about this interview with Jenna Arnold, I dreamt about my mom and my Aunt Ruth.
As I've mentioned on the show before, my dad died when I was five, and these two women raised me. And I think, in great part, I am who I am today because of that experience. And as I was reading our guest's book, I was thinking about mom and foof. My guest is Jenna Arnold, and I'm telling you, her book, Raising Our Hands, How White Women Can Stop Avoiding Hard Conversations, Start Accepting Responsibility, and Find Our Place on the New Front Lines, should be the first tool to put into your election recovery toolkit, no matter what your identity.
Jenna Arnold is an educator, entrepreneur, activist, and mom. She is the co founder of Organize, a non profit organization. dedicated to reforming the U.S. organ donation system and increasing patient access to life saving transplants. Jenna, as I was reading the opening pages of your book, I was so moved by the idea of listening circles and by how you open yourself to an exploration of what in this election was demonized as wokeness. Now to me, wokeness has been a gift of the past five years. Why would anyone reject that, moments of awakening and fresh perspective now?
What you do when you get the fuck out of bed after you've gotten woke is another matter and that's worth definitely having a conversation about but to wake up to a new understanding primarily of yourself and your place in the world, that's a gift and to me this post election Period is a time for your book.
It's so important to understand what this election meant by examining the six to eight years that preceded it. And I have to say, of all the complaints I heard from people who decided not to vote for Harris, or not to vote at all, the one that hit me hardest was because she was a woman. Not to mention a woman of color.
I'd, I'd really give anything to talk to Mom and Aunt Ruth about how they would have processed this election. I'm, I'm almost glad because of the heartbreak, I know they would have felt that they didn't live to see it. I feel like your book, Jenna, explores terrain that we need to re-explore, not put behind us.
Raising our hands is an amazing tool, and Jenna Arnold, I am proud to have you on the show.
Jenna: Well, thank you for reading the book. I have to say, I've most enjoyed men's readouts of the book, mostly men of color. There's been a surprising amount of men of color who have read the book. I think in like a voyeuristic way, there's like a, oh, that's why!
I'm waiting for a white dude to write that same book so I can read it. I always felt bad that this book existed and that it occupied space on a bookshelf because if you think about a Barnes Noble bookshelf, no one buys books at a bookstore anymore. I know that. But just for this analogy that it's, you know, it's an inch and a half thick and it's taking up an inch and a half that's not being given to another voice.
I also think a book like this is needed as a conduit, as like an on ramp, because in some ways it's like it takes one to know one. I called someone out, I remember, in business like 15 years ago, not to their face, but like behind closed doors, I was like, something's happening right there and this is what I think it is.
And they were like, how did you know? And I was like, because it takes one to know one. I've pulled that before. And it's a really important exercise and mirror to hold up that is different than what other demographics view us as. So those moments where I'm like, we're spending a lot of time thinking about why they're not we're skinny enough and not what we're gonna do about climate change.
The internal dialogue is hard for people from the outside to hear. Consequential behavior is so important to hear from them and like our blind spots. We don't know where our blind spots are, but I can certainly say how I've scaffolded a prism to not look at them and how that's happened.
Ken: I'm just getting to the part of the book that talks about intersectionality and I've been talking to people about single issue voters and how that's, it is possible to be a single issue voter, but there's no such thing as a single issue politician, unfortunately.
So when you give all your political capital at that moment in the polling place, you get zero equity interest in the candidate if they are elected. So you, you voted for someone who can do whatever they want, for whatever reason, a lot of people voted for Trump, the economy, make America healthy again, whatever the single issue was. But now you see, the broad sweep of what this administration is going to look like.
And that's a form of understanding how all of these things are connected and how if you make a decision with as much thought or less thought than you've given to buying a new refrigerator and vest all of your Vote in one narrow perspective about what a candidate might do, you can end up with something pretty horrific, and I think that's what we're going to have with, with Trump.
Jenna: Agreed. Although, I don't know, I don't know if I agree with the sentiment that people didn't think about it. I think people considered it, and then they, favorite term of mine, called cognitive acrobatics.
Ken: Yes.
Jenna: So they knew they wanted to vote for him. And so they started doing the cartwheels and the backflips and the somersaults in their head to convince themselves of why he was the right choice for them, for the world, whatever it was.
And the right did a great job of being like, here are your talking points, guys. They're pretty simple and shallow.
Ken: Yeah.
Jenna: The southern border is being bumrushed. You don't have enough money in your bank account and that's someone's fault.
Ken: Egg prices.
Jenna: I mean, don't get me started on egg prices because egg prices actually haven't, haven't gone up.
The high quality egg prices have gone up, but the dozen eggs at Walmart is still $3.80, the same amount that they were six years ago and eight years ago. And so it's just like, they picked a couple of wedge issues in the same way that they picked abortion in the early 70s, where it's like, okay, we're going to scare you about the following, the people at the border who are going to kick your kid out of their school desk. You're going to have no money left in your bank account, that's somebody else's fault. Trans athletes, your kid's not going to be able to play even though they love soccer so much.
Ken: And it's their future. Their whole future is soccer.
Jenna: Dude, this, we could have a whole other conversation about youth sports and I will then pass the mic to somebody else who's much smarter on it, but how this country hedges around youth sports as the ticket to undergrad as if undergrad is the ticket to financial success.
And, you know, one of the things that's been bothering me about the hair splitting around the outtakes of the election, and mind you, I have not read a full article. I have not read a single, I have not watched a single episode of news and I'm really not scrolling, but I have seen a lot of college educated, not college educated as if college is the thing that makes people worldly and intellectual and understanding and able to handle nuance.
Now, at one point I considered going to law school and my mom said, listen, grad school is just like, they might as well send you your graduation certificate with your, uh, acceptance letter.
Because, like, the truth is, is grad school is just like a lot of books and a lot of writing. But what you do in higher education is you learn how to think. You're not smarter. You learn how to think harder.
Ken: And you develop an appetite, if it works.
Jenna: Curiosity. Right.
Ken: Yeah. For learning.
Jenna: Hopefully, on my selfish plug for my podcast, Let's Begin How to Raise Children and Ourselves at the Same Time, we talk about the importance of curiosity.
The kids are born curious, just like children are born with all their social emotional capacities. We just start stripping them out, when we start saying, boys will be boys, boys prioritize sports over your friends, or don't be curious, this is how you solve the quadratic formula, and if you don't know that, you can't take the standardized test.
Like all of these things about how to be human and how to interpret what's happening around the world are things that we don't need to teach anyone.
Ken: Yeah.
Jenna: We need to protect them now.
Ken: It reminds me of the aphorism from John Dewey that there is no such thing as genius. Some kids are less damaged than others.
Jenna: That's right. That's right.
Ken: It really stuck with me because I was interested in, in progressive education as an undergraduate and experienced it when I went to the UK and watched, uh, open classrooms at work and watch these kids exploring the world on the strength of their curiosity and the encouragement of teachers who said, oh yeah, let's, let's write an essay about those bugs or let's make a painting about, about that spaceship or whatever it might be. Uh, and the curriculum was designed around their curiosity, right? It flowed from that.
Jenna: Yeah. It's heartbreaking because we actually, but it's not like we have to rediscover best practices, you know, like they're already there.
We just have to like decide we're going to invest in them and you don't have to just follow the money. A society prioritizes what they spend money on, and we spend money on other things. Not our children, not our children's safety, not our children's lives, whatever you could really plug in. Their health.
Yeah. Yeah. Their futures, anything.
Ken: Absolutely. So you were engaged in the Harris campaign, right? And you were, can you say a little bit about what you were doing?
Jenna: So, I worked alongside the Harris campaign. And what I mean by alongside is, I ran my own personal campaign. I did what I thought needed to be done, and I didn't have the bandwidth the interest, the patience, nor did I trust pushing ideas up through the org chart within the Harris campaign.
I, I won't put any of the responsibility on her shoulders. And I actually am okay like protecting Biden a little bit here too. I put it squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party, no matter who the candidate is, should have not just like a car with some keys for a new candidate to step into 100 days out, but like the fastest, coolest car, on with, like, the seat warmers heated.
Ken: Yes.
Jenna: Yeah. In some spaces, her campaign, in parts of Pennsylvania, some of the most critical counties, there weren't even a set of keys, or there weren't even a, there wasn't even a car for her to drive.
Ken: But we heard so much about the, how the ground game was so far superior to what Trump's side fielded.
Jenna: Yeah it was.
Ken: How do you mean no keys or no car? Say more about that.
Jenna: Gosh, this is like hours worth of conversation again. And it's still unclear and it's still like, you know, last night I had a three hour conversation. I was like, oh, that was exactly what the bottleneck was. Thank you for, someone else had a different vantage point into what that bottleneck was and I couldn't kind of figure out what the problem was.
So post 2016, the shock of 2016 when Hillary lost a lot of what would be described as grassroots organizers who would not call themselves grassroots or organizers. They were just largely women and people of color who were like, well, I guess we got to do something.
They started doing something, which meant like organizing locally. Raising their hand to run. Starting to create email lists of people who cared about stuff. And I'll speak to Pennsylvania, so there were a handful of women who had never organized anything political before in Pennsylvania who started saying, okay, all the women, if you want to go down to the women's March, okay, all the women, if you want to protest at this thing here, this is the address in Harrisburg.
Okay. All the women who are da da da. And this list grew exponentially. Quickly. So sure, it was like Women's March, but then remember a week later, it was the Muslim ban. So it was like, where are we doing protests for the Muslim ban? And then, so it was like, it was a very active civil disobedience period that required like, okay, go to this address at this point.
And so Facebook groups, Instagram handles and email lists started to be cultivated. Fast forward to 2020, Biden is running and the DNC started to rely on the email lists. Of the groups that had been organized haphazardly within the swing states because the DNC hadn't historically been out in these swing counties in these swing states for years.
So they didn't know, they knew Jenna was a registered Democrat. And she, they knew my zip code, but they didn't know if Jenna cared more about climate or reproductive health. They didn't know if Jenna went to this march, but not this march. So like that basic data, basic data, the DNC didn't have. So coming into 2020, the DNC said, can we have your data because everyone was like getting on the bandwagon to get Biden elected.
Everyone was like, sure, I'm not going to get too nuanced because it's still a little politically, egoy, but in some swing states, the organizers handed the floppy disk, I'm obviously being facetious, the floppy disk over to the party. In some states, they said, we'll work with you. So in states like Pennsylvania, there was a separate Pennsylvania Democratic Party.
Different than the Harris campaign, different than the Democratic Party. And sometimes, as might happen in any industry, sometimes egos get in the way. So what preferably happens is that each state has their own Democratic Party that's supported by the DNC, where it's like, okay, here's all the people who are running for the local state houses, local congressional leaders, people who are running for school board, people are running for sheriff.
And like the Democratic Party within that state provides air cover for those, what we know as down ballot candidates and the DNC is supposed to give them money and resources and help lift them up and all that kind of, and then the DNC focuses on top of the ticket. But since there was like such a tight turnaround that people who are organizing on behalf of down ballot candidates in some states like Wisconsin, Nevada, you can actually see again.
The states where down ballot candidates did well, the Democratic down ballot candidates did well, the state party and the national party worked well together. In states where down ballot candidates did not do well, there was not a lot of cross pollination collaboration or it was really clunky. I found myself as a rogue organizer and I prefer to be that way.
I have worked on so many movements within so many organizations. Jenna is better on the outside of the sandbox because I do a lot of doing and then asking for forgiveness later and it's helpful to do that. My specific hand of cards, the resources I have, the relationships that I have, the megaphone that I have, makes it best for me to drive up and down 611, 202, 263, which are major corridors between Philadelphia out into Bucks County, and put signs up in places that might not be totally welcome.
Because I look the way that I do, and I drive a certain car, and I can talk about the Eagles, and I can talk about my uncle who runs the steel company up in Bethlehem if I get in trouble, right? Like there's just certain things that Jenna can do. So it became clear to me around September 1st, grassroots organizations were not working very well with the campaign and the campaign was having a hard time getting into them.
And there wasn't a lot of collaboration. For example, Ken, there's 400,000. I know that number feels extraordinarily huge and I'm not going to walk you through the math, but maybe just for argument's sake, you'll trust me. There's 400,000. unregistered 18 to 24 year olds in the state of Pennsylvania.
Ken: It's a big number.
Jenna: And it feels like that doesn't math. I promise it does. 400,000 unregistered 18 to 24 year olds. Could have won this campaign. Could have won this election if all we did over the past four years was register 18 to 24 year olds. That's it. Guess what you have to do to do that? Pizza. Sometimes pepperoni.
That's all you have to do. So the party. In Bucks County, Delco, Montco, other parts in the central part of the state. They just had to have pizza on Friday nights.
Ken: Yeah.
Jenna: Who wants a pie? Bring your friends. Register to vote. Anyone can have as many slices as they want. Pizza.
Ken: Yeah.
Jenna: But just for the record, it's not like the Republican Party is a well greased machine.
Ken: LYeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. Uh, now what happens is in the interpretation of how the election turned out, of course there are some people who are concerned about the mechanics and know that that's underlying. Tells a lot of the story. But, what the loss drags into the public realm, is all kinds of explanations that are very worrisome, like this is a revocation of all of the ideas and sentiments and experiences that came about under what we might generally describe as wokeness.
And I use wokeness as a complimentary term. What do you make of how this is the anti woke election?
Jenna: Well, because like, it kind of is in one. Like, guys, sexism and racism is still a thing.
Ken: Yeah.
Jenna: I spend a lot of time on right leaning shows. And they're like, ah, wokeism. And I'm like, what does awake mean to you?
Just, I'm just curious.
Ken: Yeah. What's so bad about that? Yeah.
Jenna: What's, what's so bad about asking? More questions.
Ken: That's it. Especially when the questions start hitting home and help you explain yourself to yourself.
Jenna: Right, but Ken, we don't have the musculature in the country. We haven't raised our kids, ourselves, to be able to handle our own shame, and our own embarrassment, and our own disappointment that we got something wrong.
Remember, we live in a world that is meritocracy based. You either got the A on the test. You are the quarterback, prom queen, got into the university, have the job title, have the money in the bank account, have the woman and then the women on the side, or you don't. There's not a lot of grey here. There's not a lot of, like, in betweeness.
It's out for discussion as to whether or not this is a species level thing. We always gravitate to the laziest, easiest thing that, like, oh, it's red. Or it's blue. No, it's, maybe it's just purple. So, are we lazy? Sure. Are we smart enough to be able to handle that it's purple sometimes, sometimes red, sometimes blue?
Also, sure. And it does require a little bit more, like, thought. Like, it was so uncomfortable. I did this town hall with Chris Cuomo. And I said on there, listen, everybody loses no matter who wins the election. And they were like, what? What? What does that mean? How does that mean? I'm like, yeah, everyone loses.
This is a really terrible situation that we're in as a country. And that greyness is like, it's really uncomfortable for us. We would rather be on a team that either wins or loses than like sit in a place of like, well, I guess we have some more work to do. This is so terrible. I made this mistake when I was a first grade teacher.
I love teaching. I miss the classroom so much.
Ken: I know. In the book, you said it was your favorite job ever. My favorite job ever. First and fifth grade.
Jenna: And my daughter said to me this morning, we were laying in bed long past the alarm as I like kick myself every time I'm driving into school late, we were laying in bed and she goes, mommy. Why don't you run for office?
And I was like, well, because I don't know if I would, where I would, and like, I don't know if I would win. And that would be, could be really hard for you. And she's nine and she goes, yeah, but won't you just make another plan if you lose? And I was scrambling in the aftermath of the election because I had her, a lot of her fourth grade friends out on the canvassing trail with us.
One, I was using them as bait. They were going up to doors by themselves. I was standing on the driveway, but like, it's much easier for someone who doesn't want to deal with a canvasser.
Ken: A very good political use of children.
Jenna: Right. They were all puppets for my use. I basically remind them all the time. I had them just so I can post photos of you on Instagram.
Ken: Yeah.
Jenna: And so when I saw a bunch of them, like, the day after, they looked at me like, you promised me something different a little bit, Jenna. You promised me something different, and I did. And my immediate response was, guys, the adults are making a plan. We're making a new plan. We're going to make, we're going to make a plan.
You're safe. It's our job to keep other people safe. And I'm making a plan. And my plan was going home and getting in bed and watching the new season of Diplomat. And that needed to be my plan for a couple days. There is a different set of work that has to happen today. White folks, I am speaking directly, I am speaking specifically to white, democratic, voting women right now.
And like, I could froth at the mouth. Our job is not to vote, donate money, canvas when it's convenient, and have combative conversations with our brother and father in laws and maybe our boss's sons. Our job is to figure out why we are so damn uncomfortable with our shortcomings. Be it in the body shape department, be it in the academic department, job title department, financial department.
And once we realize it's because we were told we were not enough unless we had fill in the blank. And until you start saying fuck you to every single one of them, that doesn't mean you can't enjoy a good trip to Target. It doesn't mean you can't want a new counter in your kitchen, but until you understand how you are playing and propping up the systems, we're going to see this again, because the system that we protect the most are excuses on behalf of our husbands and our sons.
Ken: Yeah. You know, and the opening pages of your amazing book, Raising Our Hands, is when you walk into that dilemma. I was really, um, I had another woke experience reading those opening pages of your book.
Jenna: I'm sort of half sarcastically saying, where's the white man who's written that same book? And now there's a whole host of men who are sort of experts on the state of men and boys in this country, of which I also just had one on my podcast, Let's Begin. You can find it wherever you find your podcast. Mark Green, who talks about what the systems have done to our sons, and why when we ask them to see what their mothers are telling them, that they don't have the capacity.
And I use the term musculature very, very intentionally.
Ken: Yeah. As I was picking up the initial threads of your argument, I was taken back to fundamental questions about how I was raised and what my mom and Aunt Ruth were going through to raise me. They had no money. They had no, you know, they just had to work all the time.
Everyone else had a dad. I was ashamed, ashamed. I didn't have a dad, so I picked up bits and pieces of fathers and manhood and what is now known as the manosphere from television, from uncles, from, you know, teachers I admire.
Jenna: There's plenty of places for you to go shopping, Ken.
Ken: That's exactly right.
And, and what a, uh, what a pastiche it turned out to be. The reason I say this is, uh, the first tool in your election recovery kit is because you talk about the importance of doing that exploration, which you just explained. Everyone has that element. It's different, I think distinctly different for white women, for people of color.
For white men every time I hear someone saying that black men, some black men defected to Trump, my first thought is hey, did anyone check on the white men of Irish descent and see how my team did? Cuz we all know how they did. I'm kind of thinking we ought to ask ourselves that before we start saying hey.
Jenna: It’s like you even see it in the post election, which is I like I'm not listening to any of you. I'm not listening to any of you, because everyone wants to blame.
Again, that's, is it lazy or is that Americanized? Is that a Western thing? I can't take responsibility? Because guess what? We also don't know how to do? Apologize. We don't know how to apologize. So like, this election for me, it's so interesting. I've, it was my mom's 70th birthday and there was a big party and there was lots of friends who I haven't seen in a while.
All of them know what I do ish. And a lot of them came up and were like, oh my god, I want to flip a table. And I'm like, you should, did you want to do that 2016? What about in 2012? You know, and so there's like, there's new people who are getting on the bandwagon. My issue is, is that I'm so fearful that we're gonna feed them this false gauntlet of the things that they need to do to be a part of the solution, when the solution, dare I quote, the most annoying statement ever made by one of the most famous peace builders ever, of which I did not understand until I had to write that damn book and hold up my own mirror was. You actually have to be the change you want to see in the world. Oh, sorry. Gandhi said that for all those who don't know.
Ken: You know, I, I, uh, when I think about this outcome, I also think about how, how progressives handle these kinds of circumstances versus how the right does when it comes down to basic, uh, raw efficiency. So I was always struck that when, uh, we had the, you know, Occupy Wall Street strategy, we were asking people to live on the street, move out of their homes and be in cardboard boxes or whatever else and just never leave some business district.
On the other side, when it came to protesting against the ruling order, conservatives organized to fuck up House District Home Sessions, right? And they flipped the House, and we
Jenna: We're still cleaning up the mess, by the way.
Ken: Yeah. We're
Jenna: We’re still cleaning up the red wave mess from 2010.
Ken: Absolutely. We didn't learn the operational lessons of how to do that.
Jenna: Yeah, but you know what? This whole, like, we learn thing, like everyone's happy to pontificate about like, again, like the we learn is a little bit like putting, I'm not saying that you're putting blame, but you're a little bit like, you should have caught that. And when I think about the people who are running the Occupy Wall Street movement, like, there were like 19 year old kids who were like, this isn't adding up.
I am gonna park myself in this square. And I love that. They weren't the people in the middle clay at HHS. These were just kids who were like, this doesn't add up. And of course, like more people participated, but it's like, they weren't part of the establishment. They are now part of the like movement establishment. A lot of those folks.
The other thing is, is, and this is where, ugh, I had such a hard breakfast this morning with someone who was like, I don't care about, I mean, she deeply cared about the outcome of the election, but she was like, I just, I've given up on national politics. And so we were talking about like, well, national politics is, you know, that system is really there to provide air cover, you know, it's not there to fix every pothole, it's there to hopefully trickle resources down so that someone locally is like, that pothole on Church Road needs to be filled in.
So for me, there's this like entitlement thing that I’m getting a lot from people like blaming we haven't, it’s this demographic, we don't know what we're doing. And as I just did earlier, I'm like, the damn Democratic Party didn't have the stone house. There should be a stone house built in all 33 counties.
There's only 32 or 33 swing counties until the electoral map changes. Like we just need to buy a condo, cheap condo in every single one of those places and serve pizza every Friday night for people who want to continue to get involved. And I actually don't care what their politics are, but people who want to get involved, you have free pizza every Friday night.
33 counties. Not a lot. It's not a lot. The problem is, is that people feel like they are owed a better system when they're not willing to work for it in between
Ken: Well, that's my complaint about so many people thinking that the protest is the end of the process.
Jenna: Or that the election is the end of the process. Because I have a little different take on what national politics is about. That is really about handing control over either to the people who have all the money and all the control already and we do that on the Democratic side as well as on the Republican side and until people decide that they're going to step up and individually find a way to wrest that control away.
It's not gonna happen, right? I was struck during Occupy Wall Street, and I actually had a different feeling, totally different feeling about the Women's March. I felt that really was a genuine engagement opportunity where it was going to continue onward. I didn't feel it so much about Occupy Wall Street, but the Women's March, that felt And I think was something very different.
I know you were deeply involved in organizing it. That moment of protest, I'm not going to agree to Trump's vision of government, vision of control, his manospheric take on how the world should be ordered. It felt like that to me.
Jenna: I was like inner, inner, inner circle of the women's march. And truthfully, I felt the day after, that I kind of wish that the Women's March as a brand entirely dissipated because all it needed to do was be that day. It was the largest protest in human history. We had 600 marches around the world.
Ken: Amazing.
Jenna: And people came out to see and be seen is how I describe it. People wanted to be reminded of other people's dignity and that they wanted to protect their own too.
And that was a good enough step. A week later was the Muslim ban. And I believe that the reason why so many people showed up at the airports like they did is because it was mostly people who didn't go to the Women's March the week before who were like, I want in too! And they went to the airports and protested the Muslim ban, which was like a really key thing to do.
Ken: Totally.
Jenna: And then you had so many other moments over the next four years that required people to take to the streets to see and be seen on behalf of whatever the thing that was breaking their heart. And they were able to do that because of the Women's March. But the Women's March was an event, a moment.
It wasn't an organization. And I still look back and wish, Damn it. How did we not keep it together? So it's, it feels like another moment where I'm like, don't give them that much credit. Don't give us, like, we're not, we weren't capable of that. Ken, I was in charge of moving satellites in the sky and coordinating the HazMat team.
Guess who's unqualified to be in charge of moving satellites?
Ken: I would never have guessed.
Jenna: And coordinating like,
Ken: I wouldn't put that past you.
Jenna: The worst case scenario with the HazMat team in Washington, D. C. Not me. You know, and a lot of us have been activists in different lanes and doing different things and some of our teeth were cut a little bit more differently, much harder in different ways.
But no one was ready for that. No one was ready for that. The entire, we had prime ministers calling us the next day, like now what? But we weren't ready for that. And the seeds that were planted though, and the amount of people who come to me and they're like, I marched. And I'm like, and this is my favorite question I ask them, Ken, why'd you march?
And they all like fumble with an answer. And that, to me, is the poetry. Is that no one is like, we marched because of the gender pay gap. We marched because we won the decrease in terrorism. We marched for immigrant rights. No one, no one knows why they marched. They just had to come out.
Ken: Yeah. And they had to be together.
Jenna: Yeah. We need to be more together and not in a, like, we need to link arms, but like, you know, the nuclear family experiment has failed, right? In the early part of the century, everyone go get your own like little mini two bedroom center hall colonials and your own little thing with your own white picket fence and your own Cadillac and your own vacuum cleaner and your own mixer and your parents shouldn't live with you anymore and, and no one knew how to raise the damn kids and it was just like, we, our village is dissolved because.
Coming out of World War I and II, like, this is how we're going to prop up the economy again. It helped. We maintained our status as a world power. It's kept us there. But like, the nuclear family does not work. And that's another thing that I would love for more white women to be like, huh, I wish I was better at asking for help.
Not just of my therapist. Not just of my kids' pediatricians and kids’ teachers, but of like my sister that I walk around pretending like everything's okay in front of or, you know, we're supposed to be in this together. And that's what the Women's March did, was like, oh, there's other people. I'll tell you this one story again.
So I was in my third month with my second kid, so nauseous, pregnant, so, so nauseous. And we decided arbitrarily, we were going to get on site at like. 3:30 or 4:30 in the morning in D.C., Independence Inn, 3rd or 4th, I can't remember, I think it was Independence Inn 3rd, because we're going to have things we're going to have to do.
And it was dark, obviously, at 4 in the morning, we'll say, and I am like, and cold and I'm barely able to zip up my winter jacket because I had a bump, and so nauseous. And there was nothing open, nothing that had saltines at least, and there was nobody around. And we had ordered 30 golf carts because we had a bunch of like big name people coming and they were supposed to meet us.
I forget the logistics, but they were supposed to meet us, pretend like three blocks away and then we're going to golf cart them into backstage so that they get up on stage and say their thing.
Jenna: Like the irony of it all, like the golf carts were parked and they were never able to be moved again. So my brother and I took a golf cart.
And we went on a joyride all over the mall, all over, and it's like everything was shut down because it was right after the inauguration as well. We were joyriding like up the Capitol steps, down the Capitol steps, and like these like eight person massive buggies that were like, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, driving all over the place because we didn't know if anyone was going to come.
And until like 7 a. m., we saw the first gaggle of five women from like Indianapolis.
Ken: Oh. Oh, wow.
Jenna: And they showed up at like the first barrier, and they had the cutest signs. And I remember looking at some of the other organizers and we were like, oh my God, these five women actually came. Mind you, the entire city was shut down for us.
But like, we didn't know if anyone was going to come. We didn't know if anyone else needed to be in grief and in hope with us. Like, we needed to be with them.
Ken: What's next after a, a march like that or a collective action? How do you, I think your book's about how you show up just in life.
Jenna: I think what you're asking is a two part question.
The first one is what are you going to do with yourself? You know when, like, you, like, have all, when you go for, like, a sauna and, you know, like, oh, the toxins are coming out of my body, you know, like, I got to sweat it out. It's like, you have to do that with the systems that we've inherited. And then you're going to be consuming more toxins because what you're going to hear about how the system respects, feels, appreciates, protects your body.
It's going to take another generation to purge those things over the next four years. I believe now that the only way to get on course, stay on course, it's for you to hold yourself and the men in your lives accountable. And that requires you to do some uncomfortable work with yourself. And it's not, I was watching some like newbies in the work around the campaign because everyone was like really nervous to canvas.
So I found myself like holding people's hands to go up to the door and knock and be like, okay, this is how you start the conversation.
Ken: It is intimidating.
Jenna: It's intimidating.
Ken: A cold door.
Jenna: And we don't train each other on how to do this well. So the campaign says, go knock, knock with a big Harris wall sticker like mid chest, so you're like here it is. I don't do that. I knock, knock. Hey, I'm Jenna. I just wanted to check in. Like, let's say this is like a couple weeks before the election. Okay. I just wanna make sure you know there's an election coming up and answer any questions you have. They would be like, yeah, heard about it.
Right? So immediately it's like, haha joke, like, how you doing? I didn't say, I just want to make sure you understand Harris's economic policy. Or I want to make sure you understand that Trump hates me. I didn't do that. I just said, how you doing? And they're like, oh my God, this sucks. And then you would be like, mm hmm, I'm afraid to.
Ken: And your book reads that way. Not just relatability, it's just a brilliant way to think about how people put the world together and they put the world together with starting with what's familiar to them. And so you going up to a door the way you just described, which all great organizers know to do is really about getting people to understand that it's not so alien to engage in political discourse or conversation or, or involvement.
Jenna: Right. Or to say, I'm scared. Like, it's actually very familiar for all of us to say to strangers, I'm afraid.
Ken: Yeah.
Jenna: It’s harder for us to do it to our sisters and our brothers and our parents. And that's like the real work. I tell you, Ken, I come from a huge family and the eldest of 25 cousins. It is so much harder to be in family in these times.
Big family, opinionated family, it used to be the same thing if you had a large group of friends or if you worked at a big corporation, it's so much harder in your intimate circles than it is to go up to any cold door or to go on air. It is really, really hard. And the thing that I believe is the work of our time is we have to be more honest and vulnerable with ourselves without desperately looking for the concrete answer so that we can let other people be vulnerable and honest with their confusion, their concern, and their fear too.
Because I go up against like Moms for Liberty who are like trying to strip our kids books in classrooms because they're like scared it's going to turn kids gay or whatever their thing is. I'm like, what are you scared about? And they're like, literacy. I'm like, yo, me too. We can just start.
This doesn't have to be combative NFL sports, but remember that's how we're raised to believe every Sunday for six months a year.
Ken: Exactly. Well, thank you for everything you're doing, and I know you're going to keep doing it. I really am going to recommend for people to open this book from a different era and experience the, the insights and the rediscovery to me of, um, all of the things that had me hopeful after Trump's first election.
We need that hopefulness, that curiosity, that, that ability to talk to one another. Even more now, it seems to me. And I'm, I'm very grateful that you've provided this tool among all the other things you do.
Jenna: Thanks for having me, Ken.
Ken: Jenna, thank you for joining us and thank you for all the work you do and the book you wrote.
I also want to thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links to take a deeper dive into today's discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram at Ken Cooke's podcast. And if you're interested in learning more about EWG, head over to EWG.
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They just don't know it yet. My ask is that you send it to that person or as many people as you see fit. Today's episode was produced by the amazing Beth Rowe and Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music is by Moby. Thank you very much, Moby. And thanks again to all of you for listening.