Briahna Joy Gray changed her career from attorney to progressive political writer a couple years ago. It’s very clear from her writing that her own political philosophy aligns closely with Bernie Sanders’s. She was a Sanders supporter in 2016 and she actually credits the “progressive vision embodied by” the Sanders 2016 campaign as the inspiration for her writing career. Since Sanders has been the subject of a number of her articles, including an interview she did with him last year for New York Magazine, and since she’s quickly earned a reputation for being a topnotch political writer on topics that are squarely in Sanders’s bailiwick, her taking the role of press secretary for his 2020 campaign seems a pretty natural fit.
About a year and a half ago, I posted a diary on Daily Kos to discuss an article Gray wrote in Current Affairs called “How Identity Became a Weapon Against the Left.” The comment thread was not as contentious as you might expect, given the topic of Gray’s article. Here are a few remarks from the comment thread by well-known members of the Daily Kos community:
Ian Reifkowitz: “Ms. Gray’s article is the most sophisticated analysis of this I’ve read yet. Brilliant. ...”
Catte Nappe: ”Interesting and worthwhile reading. ...”
Chitown Kev: [regarding Gray’s theme that “there are risks to viewing the world through the prism of identity”] “on this note...sang it, sistah, this agnostic black gay man could write volumes on this.”
Of course there were folks in the comment thread who challenged points Gray made in her article, but only one commenter make an ad hominem jab, dismissing Gray as a “freshly-minted ivy league lawyer” who will likely have a better appreciation of racism and sexism when she’s older.
I think the general civility of the comment thread reflected the tone of Gray’s article. As I wrote in that diary:
Gray approaches this subject in a temperate way. Though she herself — being a leftist who is female and African American — is clearly among those whose perspective (and existence) she argues have tended to be “whited-out” by the Bernie Bro meme, the article mostly avoids self-reference. She writes like an attorney (she is a Harvard-educated lawyer) methodically laying out her case. ...You don’t have to be a Bernie supporter to appreciate her razor-sharp argumentation skills.
And in May of last year, I posted a diary which invited discussion about a Rolling Stone article Gray had penned with the provocative title “The Problem with Calling Trump a Racist” which urged liberals to focus on Trump’s classism; here’s a snippet of a snippet of her article which I included in that diary:
In failing to incorporate a class analysis, writers and political analysts risk unwittingly cultivating a harmful mythology: that Trump represents the best interests of white Americans.
…
Until liberals begin connecting Trump’s racism to a class narrative, white Americans, particularly low-income white Americans, will be tempted to see Trump as their white savior, and racism as their last salvo.
No one made a negative remark about Gray in the comment thread, despite her once again tackling a touchy subject.
If you search the comment thread in that diary I wrote a year and a half ago, and the other one I wrote less than a year ago, you’ll find not a single mention of the fact that Gray voted in 2016 for Jill Stein.
I’ll go out on a limb and assert that even though she was (obviously) not secretive about voting for Stein, very few people among the American electorate — including those who participate in comment threads on Daily Kos — noticed a random tweet by a lawyer-turned-writer named Briahna Joy Gray saying she’d voted for Jill Stein. That tweet — and that vote in blue New York — were inconsequential.
Yet when it was announced that she was among many women appointed to top positions in the Sanders 2020 campaign, some folks in comment threads on Daily Kos expressed great consternation at the discovery of that tweet.
Here’s how I see it: Gray voted for the Green Party candidate in an election which pretty much everyone believed the Democratic candidate had in the bag. For weeks heading up to the election, the Daily Kos Elections front-page ticker declared Hillary Clinton’s chance of victory to be 90-plus percent, while diarists trumpeted the rosy predictions of oracles like Princeton’s Sam Wang. Here are examples, just days before the election, by three prolific Daily Kos diarists (two supported Clinton in the primaries and one supported Sanders):
Pollster.com just moved election for Pres and Senate strongly out of GOP chance. Wang now at ~100% —Nov. 3, 2016
Five Reasons Nate Silver is Wrong & Sam Wang is Right: Hillary is 99%+ Likely to WIn —Nov. 6, 2016
Soon to be President Clinton: sifting through the data, why she will outperform the polls nationally —Nov. 7, 2016
Now someone might argue that Daily Kos, a leading Democratic/progressive website running that daily rosy ticker, and hosting such rosy user blogs, could result in some complacency among its very sizable readership, so some Daily Kos readers who for whatever reasons didn’t like Hillary might have decided it was OK to simply leave the presidential line empty on their ballot or to vote for Stein or some other candidate on the left. But if you think Daily Kos didn’t likely swing this election, then surely neither did a random tweet from a then not very well-known writer.
The concern about her tweet cannot reasonably be that she is responsible at all for Donald Trump’s election.
And I would think no one is questioning her IQ or her agency to decide which of two women on the liberal side of the American political spectrum she would cast her vote for.
The concern here seems to be her loyalty to the Democratic Party. The logic seems to be that if someone ever, or in the particular case of 2016, voted for a third-party candidate on the left, then it must follow that, in general, the person does not care about, or wishes the worst for, the Democratic Party.
The question of loyalty to the Democratic Party is often used as a cudgel by folks who don’t care for Bernie Sanders — even though he’s been a loyal member of the Democratic caucus member for decades, even though he vigorously campaigned for Hillary Clinton, and even though after the 2016 election his Democratic colleagues in the Senate had so much confidence in his party loyalty that they asked him to lead their voter outreach efforts.
So I’m wary of that cudgel.
Here’s my opinion of Gray: I have read enough of her articles to confidently believe that she, like Bernie Sanders (and like presumably everyone who is reading this diary) wants the Democratic Party to be more successful electorally. Her articles are thoughtful and cogent. You may disagree with certain points — but disagreement isn’t unusual among intelligent folk.
Being a lawyer and a sharp-as-a-tack political writer may be great experience for her new job, though no doubt being press secretary on a presidential campaign is a distinctly different type of job. I hope Gray excels at it.