The She the People founder believes women of color, and Black women especially, have a unique ability “to see through the lies and to embrace a justice vision”—and talked to Ms. about why we need their leadership to confront the regressive politics of this moment.
Aimee Allison founded She the People to empower more of us to envision an America redefined and inspired by women of color. As its president, she launches and spearheads efforts to demonstrate the political power of women as color and advance racial, economic, and gender justice.
As part of the first episode of the new Ms. Studios podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward, Allison talked to Ms. consulting editor Carmen Rios about her vision for a feminist future, rewriting the American story, and what it will take for us to build a better democracy.
The first episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward is out now! Tune in to hear from Allison, pollster and leading political strategist Celinda Lake, New Mexico state Sen. Angel Charley, RepresentWomen founder Cynthia Richie Terrell, and professors Julie C. Suk and Jennifer M. Piscopo — both experts in gender in politics and the law. Together, they explore why women’s political representation matters, and what we can learn from feminist history to shift power in this country.
Make sure to like, follow and subscribe to Looking Back, Moving Forward today so you won’t miss a second of the conversations and revelations to come. And be sure to keep an eye out for bonus content from every episode in the podcast portal and here on the Ms. website!
This interview has been edited and re-organized for clarity and length.
Carmen Rios: Talk to me a little bit about your journey to She the People. What leads you to this work?
Aimee Allison: I’ve been in electoral politics for 30 years — and about 10 years ago, I realized something really important: There was an unacknowledged group of people that were organizing in states that we’d worked on: the women.
It was what She the People really came out of. I wasn’t like, I’m going to start an organization. I was more like, I’m going to focus on Black, Latina, Asian American and Native women who are very critical to the idea that we can win justice, electing a new kind of leader, and who are organizing for justice on the ground.
The first thing I did was organize at the DNC in Philadelphia in 2016. That was when everyone assumed Hillary Clinton was going to be president. We had about 500 women of color in this event for the DNC that was about women of color, and at that time, the speakers, such as Stacey Abrams, Nina Turner and Jane Kim, were saying, “Look, we’ve got a national party that’s not even really acknowledging us, who’s cutting us off at not supporting our leadership during primaries, we don’t get party support — and yet, look how critical we are.”
It wasn’t long after that, I decided: I’m going to write a book. I’m going to call the book She the People. I was inspired by the idea that we need to evolve our thinking about who women are. Who were the women who are going to be the courageous leaders in this next political era?
One thing led to another — and instead of a book, I launched an organization.
Probably one of the most famous things we did came out of a retreat. I’d already done a She the People event, which got a lot of media attention, and launched it in San Francisco. It was eight weeks before the midterm elections in 2018, and Trump was already president for the first time, and we had a lot of stars — not only elected in this new cadre of women, like Deb Haaland, and Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, these very exciting, progressive women of color, who were entering Congress, but also women who were leading Texas Organizing Project, and One Arizona, and New Georgia Project, and Florida Rising.
I went to this global women’s retreat right after it, and they challenged us to think about the biggest power move that would support my work. I was sitting by myself, probably on the last day, and I realized the biggest power move for women of color, to have us seen and heard, was to have a presidential forum.
At that time, I did not know how to do a presidential forum. Most forums were state parties or big organizations, like unions or NAACP, but we pulled it off in three months, and it went viral. It reached tens of millions of people. And the idea that women of color were a political power bloc came into being in this generation.
We didn’t make it up. We all stood on the shoulders of people who were activists before. But that was really the beginning of what She the People was able to do, and was able to establish.
Rios: You’ve built this movement that confronts the intertwined nature of the health of our democracy and the urgency of that kind of political representation, political power, and political voice for women of color. Why are women’s rights so essential to democracy? Why is it so urgent that we’re centering women of color’s voices and perspectives and experiences when we look towards the future of this country?
Allison: Can I just say something about the term ‘women of color’ for a moment? Because we are facing so many attacks based on identity. If you’re not a white guy who has money, at some level right now, you’re being attacked, but especially if you’re a nonwhite woman, along with other people.
People either like the term ‘women of color’ or don’t like the term. It was never intended to be a replacement for a race, or ability, or religion, nationality, or ethnicity. Women of color, from the very beginnings—from 1977’s National Women’s Conference, when a group of Black women brought a justice platform, and other nonwhite women who saw that they wanted an expansive view of feminism that didn’t exist at that time—called themselves ‘women of color’ because it was always a political term of solidarity.
Solidarity and justice are baked into the concept of ‘women of color.’ You cannot have it any other way. Nonwhite women who are, let’s say, Trump supporters: They’re not like us.
It is my deep hope that we build this culture that celebrates the godmothers, particularly Black and brown women who were here the whole time, who showed us how to fight.
Aimee Allison
There are three huge cultural forces that we’re dealing with right now, and we have since the inception of this country: racism and white supremacy — at its core, it has a lot to do with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous people; patriarchy and male supremacy, in all the ways that we have seen [in] the culture, even now; and market capitalism.
And all of these forces have pressed on and limited our review of what’s possible. Why am I going into this speech? Because it’s very important, in this time, where our democracy has faltered. We have a regime in charge who’s trying to take us back to the 1850s — before Reconstruction and the 14th Amendment, and birthright citizenship, and all the things that our predecessors, our godmothers, had fought for.
Those things are at risk of being removed, fast as they can, and it’s important that we recognize the role of women, from the very beginning of the country until now.
I don’t know about you, but [I] had to say the Pledge of Allegiance, growing up in Ohio. I had a story about the founding fathers, and their wisdom, and things like that, but we have to break the spell that we have been under about what this country is in order for us to create something new — and Black women,more than most people, throughout history, have been able to see through the lies and to embrace a justice vision.
That was true when the founding documents were crafted — by a bunch of slaveholding people, who wrote in there that Black people were not human, and Native people were not human — until now.
The forces that have taken over the U.S. have taken over many places. It’s a global thing that’s happening, in places like Hungary, and it happened in places like Brazil, the Philippines, and others, and what we do know is that this legacy that women were born into. At our very best, women-led movements have been central to both defining what’s possible in terms of justice and having the infrastructure in terms of fighting for democracy.
That’s one person, one vote. That’s a society where people can live with dignity. Women-led movements, at their best, can be that, and that has been true, certainly, for 250 years, since the U.S. was around, but that is why I have focused on women of color. As a Black woman, I understand the specific and very powerful role that we have had.
The way I think about us at our best is: We have been standing in the gap. I grew up in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Central Ohio, and the minister would talk about this Bible story about standing in the gap. The specifics of the story aren’t really that important, but the thing I got as a kid was standing in the gap means you’re protecting something precious and important, and in order to hold that space, you have to both see, with clear eyes, what is, and speak the truth about it, at the same time as envisioning what could be.
That is the hardest thing for human beings to do. It is something that is deep in the culture of Black women, and it is deeply a possibility for women of color. Not that it’s exclusive to folks, but it shows that our strongest group who can protect the idea of democracy, can protect the idea of diversity, equity, justice — the things that we have defined as bringing us together, uniting us, imagining this society that we haven’t created quite yet, all of that requires us to lean into the leadership of people who come from this tradition.
That’s why I focus on women of color. That’s why I think that that’s the best hope for America’s future, even if it means that we go back to some of the things that have been created in the last 250 years.
As those are destroyed, we have to hold a vision of what can replace it. Even now, when we’re feeling afraid and we’re confused and uncertain of the future, there’s some beautiful things that we have held through some terrible times, and that is our goal now and into the future.
Rios: There’s a lot of words and phrases and icons that we see through that we have to redefine and reclaim.
Allison: We’re going to actually have to redefine what freedom is, because the anti-women, anti-people of color forces, they claimed patriotism, freedom, and citizenship — and we’re going to have to reclaim those words, because freedom is a big one.
We have to break the spell of the stories about our own history that haven’t been told to us. I’m 55 and just learned the Statue of Liberty, which is a symbol of freedom, and a symbol that a lot of people associate with the story about “give me your tired, your hungry” — an immigration story from Europe, mostly. But that isn’t what the Statue of Liberty was.
The original guy who designed it gifted it to the U.S. after the Civil War was won by the Union and slavery was abolished, and the Lady Liberty had, in her hand, chains, broken chains, and the light. It was a symbol of the freedom of Black people. That’s what that is, and they decided they didn’t want that. They, the powers that be, [said] don’t give us Lady Liberty with broken chains. Everybody knows what the broken chain is. You have a group of people in the U.S. who had been enslaved for hundreds of years. It was the foundation of wealth, foundation of the government, foundation of all the institutions of the US, is slavery.
The artist still got chains in. The broken chains are at the feet of Lady Liberty. And I get emotional because freedom, for me, is the literal freedom of my people. My great-grandmother was born enslaved in Central Tennessee. It is not far for me. And freedom for women has to be associated not with someone just telling them, can they have an abortion or not. That’s too small. We have to expand our thinking about what freedom is and what our history is so that we have an understanding of that level of freedom.
It is my deep hope that we build this culture that celebrates the godmothers, particularly Black and brown women who were here the whole time, who showed us how to fight. You want to talk about someone fighting for freedom, literally changing people from slave to free, that is that level that we have to get our minds right about facing for this next era.
If our fundamental story about America and freedom started in ending slavery, every woman, no matter what their background, would be different. My mother’s family came nine generations ago, but they didn’t come through Ellis Island. So, what does this have to do with me? It has everything to do with me — and it has everything to do with this generation of young women.
Every time I learn a story like that, it breaks another spell, and the spell that allowed Trump and MAGA to take over this country is so layered that we’re going to have to be committed to opening our eyes more and more and learning from more and more different people in order to change things so that we can fight this.
We have to break the spell that we have been under about what this country is in order for us to create something new — and Black women… throughout history, have been able to see through the lies and to embrace a justice vision.
Aimee Allison
Rios: She the People is grounded in this vision for a redefined nation. What do you believe or hope that that redefined nation would look like? What is the vision that you hold, despite everything that we can see happening around us?
Allison: The mantra of She the People is to love our own and others. We start with love, to create a nation where everyone belongs, to ensure justice for all, and to make the American democracy live up to its greatest promise, and that’s it. That’s what I want. That’s what millions of us want.
And despite what has happened over the last 10 years — the MAGA movement, white supremacist movement, anti-immigrant movement, this anti-democracy movement, has always had strength, and it seems like it’s overwhelmingly strong right now.
I just want us to remember, at the same time, love, justice, belonging, and democracy, the core of that has also been growing. So, we’re experiencing a whitelash from that, because there are people in this country, and yes, there are millions of them, who never subscribed to the idea of love, justice, democracy, and belonging, who don’t believe in that.
So, it doesn’t mean that we’re wrong, and it doesn’t mean that love is not strong. The expression of that, the organizing of ourself, the building of solidarity, to see ourselves in people who are different, to value being around everyone.
Everyone belongs. This is our place. This is for everyone. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity. No one will go hungry. No one will be homeless. These are ideas millions of us believe. Despite Trump and MAGA taking over, for a myriad of reasons, tapping those systems that have never been made right, we’re steady, building this other thing.
I don’t want people to lose hope that that can happen, because when you have a backlash, it feels like everything is lost. I just remember my mom, who’s a white woman from Eastern Oregon. She went, as a teenager, down to Southampton, Virginia, with a bunch of white kids who saw, on television, other teenagers being hosed down for protesting their rights.
They wanted to be treated with dignity. They wanted their civil rights. And they were being attacked by the local government. She was so upset, she got on a bus with a bunch of other young people from her all-white town, and she went down to Virginia and stayed with civil rights volunteers, a Black family that had kids, and they were giving their time for this idea that Black people deserve full citizenship and protection. That’s a fundamental idea.
She was supposed to be registering voters, but really, it was her — she changed. She was there when the 1965 Civil Rights Act was signed. Remember, Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, and those came in the wake of that. She was also there when the Immigration and Naturalization Act was signed. Those things guaranteed citizenship for Black people and the protection of citizenship, voting rights, and civil rights for Black people and also ended the limits on immigration from nonwhite countries, and all that changed.
She felt, as a young person, that she had contributed to the strength, vitality and justice of this country, and when Trump won the first time, she felt all was lost. There’s a lot of people feeling all is lost, right now, and I can only say that we weren’t wrong, we stand for something extremely powerful, and we have a legacy of women who came before us that are going to actually show us the way forward, because things are going to get a lot more difficult than they get easier.
And it’s going to require us to come together in community in ways that we haven’t before, and it’s going to require us not just to challenge the patriarchy, but to challenge white supremacy and market capitalism and its effect on breaking us apart.
We’re going to have to challenge those to create a culture, not only just a political culture, but deeper, a culture that enables new structures and new ways of being.
On the other side of this, if we’re willing to challenge the old assumptions and the old biases that have limited the women’s movement here, there’s a lot of places that we can go.
Aimee Allison
Rios: Absolutely — and you talk about building this movement and the work that has to get done. I’m curious: Where does the movement building need to be? What do we need to be focusing on? What can we be thinking about that can help us advance what feels lost?
Allison: Everyone wants to know what to do. Calling the Congress members doesn’t feel adequate. Anyone who’s been watching the Democratic Party and the leadership is wondering: What’s going on? Why don’t we have a real opposition party? Why aren’t there more people committed to interrupting what is happening, and the speed of what’s happening?
It’s not sufficient — so, here’s where a multi-racial feminist movement needs to focus.
First and foremost, the battle in this next period is going to be in the cities and in the states, and we absolutely must have leaders. We need our best and brightest to be leading in these areas, in the cities, in local, in state.
It’s too trite for me to say, just go get some training from Emerge, or go to some other state legislative training, and then just run. We do need leaders to be preparing themselves to be in political office, and we equally need people to be leading movements to strengthen the ability for us to serve the needs of the community at the local and at the state level.
Rise to whatever leadership feels right. Volunteer for local movements. Build mutual aid groups. Put your name in and run for office, but only do that, not as a thing on your resume, but a way to extend the movement, in a way to shore up our protection and service to our community. There are a lot of places to plug in.
I want to say a little about our culture change. I don’t think it’s any surprise to the Ms. community that the argument for women of color challenges what had been kind of promoted culturally as feminism, which was very narrow white feminism that did not deal with white supremacy, and it’s more like a capitalistic version of feminism, which is around getting on a corporate board, or something, as if that was expansive enough.
And culturally, as women, we’re going to have to look to different kinds of leaders who don’t shrink from diversity, equity, inclusion, don’t shrink from demands for reparations [and the] land-back movement — that embrace and refuse to participate in structures made for women that don’t include and that aren’t diverse in terms of age and class.
Things are going to get rough. Economically rough — oncoming recession, cutting off federal types of money and support for people who are working-class, lower-class, who are small business people. All of that means that we’re going to have to lead differently as women.
We’re going to have to reject a certain kind of way that people have been able to get away with around advocating for women. So, I’m looking for different women to lead us. I’m looking for the helpers, and I’m looking for the heroes.
I’ll just leave you with this: Right now, who is the most outspoken in standing against Trump and MAGA? Think about this from a national leadership standpoint. You are thinking about women of color right now. You’re thinking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, right? Now, she’s in her third term. You’re thinking about Maxine Waters, who’s been in Congress for 25 years. Women of color are holding an extremely important role in leadership.
It’s time that we acknowledge that and get behind leaders — because there’s a lot of other AOCs, there’s a lot of other Ayanna Pressleys in this country. We need to both tap and support that leadership going forward, as we’re evolving as a culture, because that’s our only way. Otherwise, we’re overwhelmed with the smallness that fear imposes on us, and it feels like we wouldn’t be able to get back those wins.
But I’m telling you: On the other side of this, if we’re willing to challenge the old assumptions and the old biases that have limited the women’s movement here, there’s a lot of places that we can go.
Rios: You’ve talked a lot about the women you’re standing on the shoulders of, who have also been building this movement for centuries. Who are some of the feminist foremothers who’ve inspired your journey — or the people, right now, who are giving you hope? Who are the beacons for you in this work?
Allison: There’s so many. Let’s go way back to talk about Sojourner Truth, okay? In Ohio, she gave this really amazing speech, Ain’t I a Woman, and she called the question about white supremacy and women, and you think about people who had survived the horror of slavery and those women.
Ella Baker. During Reconstruction, you had a lot of white women, and Black women, and also some Asian American and others, that were involved in an anti-slavery movement. They were involved in envisioning a new country that included the full citizenship of Black people.
After Reconstruction fell and Black people were left on their own, the terrorism that faced communities through lynching, taking away rights, taking away the ability to be an elected official, owning property — my own family’s farm was taken by white farmers and the local law enforcement, and we were forced to flee.
This period was very terrible. And I think about Ella Baker writing about how terrible lynching is and the effect and the fear that had happened.
I think about people like Shirley Chisholm, who actually was a child of immigrants from the Caribbean, and she just decided, you know what, if you’ve got a problem, go and organize.
And she ran for state legislature in New York and formed the first tri-caucus, Black, Latino, and Asian American caucus. She was so rad. You think about these women in environments where they dealt with the Trumps of their time. They dealt with the MAGAs of their time, and they were still able to tell the truth, create newspapers, create movements, build power.
They were able to do all those things, and I think learning about those women, in the past, has helped me to have more strength for what we’re facing right now, and look at what they were able to do and what they mean. They’ve been dead for a long time, and look at what they mean to us.
We weren’t wrong. We stand for something extremely powerful, and we have a legacy of women who came before us that are going to actually show us the way forward.
Aimee Allison
Rios: This podcast is really about learning from our past, learning from the true history of feminist writing, and organizing, and social change — and what can we carry forward from the last 50-plus years of Ms. What change do you hope we can see in the next 50 years when it comes to political power, political representation, our political systems?
Allison: There was a reason that I had the presidential forum at Texas Southern, in Houston, in 2019, because women of color, as I was saying earlier, first organized themselves here. The first and only National Women’s Conference was in Houston in 1977.
And this effort wasn’t perfect, because it was at a time in our history, in the ’70s, where the first Congress members were elected, white women who had some of that narrow understanding, but you also had these women who came from movements who had this expanded view of what feminism means, what’s a feminist issue, whose water are you going to carry, who’s with you?
And they asserted themselves and really were the core of what’s considered this wave of feminism, putting justice behind all the issues, and making housing, and climate, and all of these other issues women’s issues. I was so influenced by the work of the women in this era, when I was only eight years old, and then I took it forward with She the People.
My hope for this next generation is two things.
One is that we start the baseline of women’s issues, feminist movement, by openly talking about and having an agenda that addresses capitalism, and patriarchy, and white supremacy, and racism — and we are not satisfied until we have a national organizing, 50 state or more, of women from all backgrounds. Everyone belongs to this conversation. I hope that we will have, in this next period, the second National Women’s Conference, which is actually the result of multiple years of effort and organizing to bring everyone together.
And this is the other thing, and this is about being American: I was in a fellowship called B-WEL, Black Women’s Executive Leadership fellowship. I was with 16 women. There were only a small handful of Americans — Black women from West Africa, from South Africa, from Brazil, from Europe, Canada.
And for the first time in my life, as an American, I started understanding my role and that I was part of an African diaspora, and I started to realize that most of us in the U.S. have been so accustomed to thinking it’s all about our own country, and not really focusing on what’s happening in the rest of the globe, or thinking about our country being privileged over the rest of the globe. “Everyone wants to be here, everyone wants to be us” — that kind of thing.
We’ve already seen that Trump and MAGA are changing the relationship that the U.S. has with the rest of the globe. We need to fully commit to a global women’s movement, and a global women’s movement takes us from the language of women of color, which is really racial understanding in the U.S., to a global movement that places the U.S. in the context of women’s movements around the globe, dealing with economic inequality, the results of colonialism and capitalism as a major force, that would allow us to really join sisters who are doing this important work in other parts of the world, in other languages, in other contexts.
And you know, if we talk about the global majority of women are non-European, nonwhite women, I’m still in that same frame, but nationality-wise, my hope, in the next 50 years, is that we change this American exceptionalism that does infuse the feminist movement and we commit to global.
For example, in 1992 there was a global conference — Hillary Clinton was there, and there’s CEDAW, which is part of the UN Convention on the Equality of Women and Girls. A lot of Americans went to that, and it really kind of introduced this global thinking for a whole generation.
But we haven’t had that conference since 1992, and when I worked for the Department on the Status of Women in San Francisco, we tried to get something going, and there didn’t seem to be the will. My hope is that we have another CEDAW conference, we bring another generation into this global women’s conversation, and that we, Americans, we grow and change. We evolve, and we partner much more closely with women who are doing amazing work in Africa, and in Central America, China, Korea.
We’ve got a lot to learn, and we do not know best right now. We are just in the mix, and we have a lot that we could gain, dealing with what we’re dealing with now, by learning from women across the globe.
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