The first handful of nominating contests may be over, and the field has winnowed and whitened, but Elizabeth Warren has not retreated from offering what I would call an intersectional presidential campaign.
On New Year’s Eve, Warren gave a speech commemorating the anniversary of her campaign for the presidency. Speaking to a packed crowd at the historic Old South Meeting House in Boston, calling for the importance of imagination in dark times, Warren invoked Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved black woman who, in the 1770s, in a world in which her very being was called into question, became the first black woman to publish a book of poetry in the United States. This rhetorical move was no glib campaign trick. It’s reflected in Warren’s other speeches and manifest in her plans on everything from climate change to disability rights. It’s not just that she persistently name-checks the marginalized, but that she speaks of and with them in all their complexity. Read more at The Nation.