Jane Fonda spends weekends knocking on doors for DEMS...she is 80.... [View all]

[jodymarie aimee]

Jane Fonda recently made a speech at the United State of Women Summit, and asked to bring Patrisse Cullors, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, with her. “What I said was, when Trump was elected and white supremacy was exposed, I realised that, as a white woman, the lens through which I was looking at race was too narrow. I think a lot of Trump’s election had to do with white supremacy and anger at a black president. I was stunned at how close to the surface racism in the United States is, and I needed to understand it better, so my intention right now is to try to understand more profoundly what it means to be black in the United States. And so I started studying. And I started reading books and I read Patrisse Cullors’ book, and I read Ta-Nehisi Coates. I read The New Jim Crow [by Michelle Alexander]. So I talked about what I’ve learned, specifically about mass incarceration. I’m a white woman and this is something that we white women have to know: you can’t just be empathic, you have to be very intentional. We have to confront racism. We have to stop this. Not buy into the lies that we’re told about how the prison system stops crime. No, it creates crime.”

At the weekends, she leaves Los Angeles to go knocking on the door of Trump voters. “When you’re talking to them you can’t criticise Trump. You can’t criticise Fox News. All you can do is listen to what they care about and what they’re afraid of, and then maybe tell them something that they don’t know. Because we’re all in our bubbles, including me.” Do people recognise her? “I was in Bakersfield last Saturday and knocked on 30 doors. Only one person saw me coming and said: ‘Grace and Frankie!’ It was a kick! Nobody else knew who I was. I just say: ‘I’m Jane.’ They don’t need to know.”