Jasmine Crockett and the cost of authenticity

Two years ago, Tina Fey appeared on “Las Culturistas,” one of my favorite podcasts, and delivered a line that immediately ricocheted across the internet and stuck with me personally: “Authenticity is dangerous and expensive.”

Fey’s statement landed both with me and the wider world because it felt true. I was in the midst of a deep exploration about authenticity for my forthcoming book in which I draw a conclusion that her pithy remark sums up well: Authenticity — at least as it is currently understood and enforced — is not a liberating ideal for people of color. Instead it operates as a sorting mechanism that rewards those whose identities already align with power and penalizes those whose truth challenges it.

Hosted by comedians Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, “Las Culturistas,” works because it feels like a glimpse into a FaceTime call between two of your funniest and most joyfully self-aware friends. But as its popularity has grown, so has the risk that accompanies the type of candor the hosts offer.

In a recent episode, Rogers warned listeners not to “waste [your] money sending to Jasmine Crockett,” the Democratic congresswoman from Texas who recently announced her candidacy for the Senate against the GOP incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in this year’s midterms. Yang agreed, and Rogers went on to explain that Crockett was too “well-defined” in voters’ minds compared to her primary opponent, Texas State Rep. James Talarico — a white man — who Rogers suggested is a more interesting choice because he has been more strategically ambiguous. 

The backlash against “Las Culturistas” has been swift, with many on social media pointing to racism and sexism to explain why Rogers and Yang were so quick to dismiss the candidacy of a popular Black congresswoman with strong fundraising ability. Rogers issued an apology and clarified that he meant no disrespect. 

The response to his statement has been mixed. Many commentators have lamented the comments as a bad faith use of racism and sexism accusations and that Black women cannot be immune to any criticism. In part, I agree. Black women should be held to the same standards as any other candidate, which is why this is such a revealing discussion. Essentially, the debate is about whether Crockett is unelectable because she has done something that voters have consistently complained that candidates — especially Democrats — should do more readily, which is to tell us exactly who they are and what they believe. In other words: Crockett has been too authentic. 

The irony is striking. It seems that Fey’s words are coming true, but the danger and expense of authenticity in this story doesn’t fall to Matt Rogers. It falls to Jasmine Crockett.

In U.S. politics, authenticity is treated as a prerequisite, despite it never really being defined. That lack of definition results in a huge amount of unconscious bias seeping through in how we judge our candidates. For candidates of color, authenticity is both demanded and policed in such a way that it now functions less as a virtue and more like a trap. 

This is the question at the heart of my forthcoming book, “The Real Ones: Disrupting the Hidden Ways Racism Makes Us Less Authentic.” The book examines how our cultural obsession with “authenticity” often masks a deeper demand for performance from people of color and others who have historically been denied power. In politics, this becomes particularly stark — and incredibly dangerous. We point out that voters want candidates to be their “real” selves, but in order to reap any benefits that come from political authenticity, those real selves must be nonthreatening, legible and familiar to the status quo. 

Be yourself, we say. But not that self, we whisper.

Present in Rogers’ critique is precisely this type of unconscious bias. He argued that by defining herself too well, Crockett has become unelectable. By being less well known and more difficult to caricature, Talarico is a more attractive candidate. 

But the path that Talarico is on is not equally available to Crockett precisely because of her identity. Black women are not afforded the ability to become frontrunners for Senate seats without long histories of service and the records that go along with them. We need only look to the 2024 presidential race to see how Vice President Kamala Harris was criticized for exactly what some are asking Crockett to embody right now. When Harris was ambiguous, it was not read as interesting. Instead, it was seen as evasive. When she was cautious, it was interpreted as calculating rather than strategic. But clarity and sharpness render these same candidates unfit for office. 

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This is the double bind. When Black women are fully themselves, they are deemed too radical and too defined. When they are careful, they are too guarded and aren’t to be trusted. Either way, authenticity becomes the justification for exclusion. And if Black women can be called unelectable for being both too authentic and not authentic enough, we have to recognize the fact that political authenticity isn’t really measuring anything. It’s a standard that simply allows us to reinforce an existing metric of electability that has as its true zero white male candidates. For a telling point of comparison, in the same episode that Rogers offered this critique of Crockett, he complimented Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., as being “the only politician who says exactly what he feels.” 

This reality is easily obscured when we talk about authenticity as a neutral good equally accessible to everyone. It isn’t. Authenticity has a cost structure. And that cost is not distributed evenly. Authenticity is dangerous. It is expensive. But we should be clear-eyed about who’s paying the bill.

As I explore in “The Real Ones,” this dynamic isn’t confined to politics. It plays out in workplaces, in media, in culture — anywhere power decides whose truth is palatable and whose is a liability. 

But politics makes the stakes explicit because when an assessment of authenticity determines legitimacy, it narrows the field of candidates in ways that may look organic but are in fact highly engineered.

The lesson we should take from this moment is that we should be far more honest about what we’re actually asking for when we say we want authenticity — and what the impact of that demand really is. But we should certainly not interpret it to mean that candidates like Crockett should be less themselves. In fact, I hope there’s something freeing in admitting that avoiding the authenticity trap is a fool’s errand because Crockett and other candidates like her can simply stop trying to meet a standard that eludes them. Authenticity may not be free. But we are.

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