The politics of authenticity

Maya Rupert believes there is a problem with how we perceive authenticity, particularly among public figures and politicians.

She was inspired to write her book, “The Real Ones: How to Disrupt the Hidden Ways Racism Makes Us Less Authentic,” while working on the 2020 presidential primary campaigns of Julian Castro and Elizabeth Warren, as well as the 2021 campaign for New York City mayor by Maya Wiley.  

Last week, Rupert was a guest speaker at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, as part of its President’s Forum series, where she discussed the challenges that candidates of color and women face on the campaign trail. She is also executive vice president at the digital agency Blue State and the host of the podcast “When We Win.”

In a conversation with the Beacon, Rupert discussed her research subject: authenticity, the ability to comfortably present a true self through outward appearance, speech and expression.

For example, while the candidates Rupert worked with strived to be genuine on the campaign trail, a perception of inauthenticity in the public’s eyes continually dogged them. Castro was often criticized for seeming “overly cautious” and “reserved,” she recalls.

“But he grew up being told that, ‘If you want to do this, (be successful in politics) you’re going to get one shot,’” Rupert says. “That is the experience of people of color. It’s the experience of second-generation immigrant kids. This is not something where you can kind of have a meandering youth and then come to it later. You’ve got to focus if you want to succeed.”

The Beacon’s conversation with Rupert, which has been edited for length and clarity, is below.

ROCHESTER BEACON: What was the initial concept that set you down the road of writing this book? What do you hope people take away from it?

MAYA RUPERT: I wanted to explore this question of authenticity in the way that it can wind up feeling more like a trap than like a freeing concept.

What I have heard reflected from others is there’s this kind of persistent feeling of phoniness. If you don’t feel comfortable talking about authenticity, you feel like, “Well, then that must be because I’m fake.”

And for people who have felt that, I want them to understand that that’s not necessarily what they’re responding to. If your authenticity gets policed, talking about it doesn’t feel free. I want for the people who have that feeling to feel less alone. 

But also when we’re talking about how we perceive authenticity, more than anything, what I want us to do is think more critically about what we’’e asking for when we’re asking people to be authentic. 

If we read someone as inauthentic, ask what else can be going on there. Are we in an environment that would be safe for that person to be authentic? Are we judging their authenticity based on our own expectations or based on what they’re actually telling us? 

I want it to be a more critical exploration. I don’t want people to stop trying to seek authenticity.

It can be a really powerful concept, but it should be a concept that is self-driven. And I don’t think we always allow it to be right now.

ROCHESTER BEACON: You’ve spoken before about how authenticity impacts the political world. What is your perspective on that in recent elections?

RUPERT: Honestly, I think it laid bare a lot of the problems with the way we talk about authenticity. They definitely predate Donald Trump, but I think that it was always harder to nail down then. Trump does us the favor of saying everything out loud to the point that it makes it easier to point directly to the thing and say, “That’s what we’re talking about.”

People will say Trump seems authentic even as they also say, “Well, he’s lying, and we know he’s lying, but he’s authentic.” And if you can say both of those things, I’m genuinely wondering, then what does authenticity mean?

I feel like sometimes in politics, it just has become a proxy for speaking off the cuff. I think we see it reflected in the desire to have candidates go on more podcasts, to have a freewheeling discussion with someone for three hours where you can’t stick to talking points.

When Donald Trump speaks and it’s word salad where he gets facts and details wrong, he doesn’t pay a real penalty for it. In fact, I feel like a lot of the media will do a lot of work to say, “Well, he said this, but he actually meant this.” When Kamala Harris would misspeak or talk in circles or get a policy detail wrong, she would pay for those mistakes in the press and in the public. That was a higher cost for her.

So if we punish some people for (authenticity) and we reward, or at the very least rehabilitate others for it, we’re not charging people the same thing for that version of authenticity. 

If Donald Trump is not being consistently told that he does it, he is not going to feel uncomfortable speaking off the cuff. Whereas if Kamala Harris is consistently being held to a different standard, she’s going to want to be a lot more rehearsed because there’s already this expectation that she doesn’t belong there.

I think Biden presents an interesting case study of this as well. You know, he was “Uncle Joe,” he was from Scranton, he speaks off the cuff. He would gaffe constantly and he was allowed to get away with it because it was part of his appeal. “Yeah, he’s going to say the wrong thing. But that’s just Uncle Joe.” That got read as him being authentic and down to earth.

But Joe Biden has been a senator since he was 30. Does he actually have that much in common with working people in Scranton? Is it actually authentic?

Then you take somebody like Hillary Clinton, who had her realness policed constantly. People asked “Why does she still have a Southern accent? She’s not actually from Arkansas.”

There are such limited concepts of what we will let a woman or a person of color get away with and still consider them to be acting authentically. There’s an expectation of performance that isn’t there for a white man, despite the fact that, on some level, we all knew Joe Biden was kind of performing. It didn’t hurt him politically. 

So when we start using (authenticity) as a proxy for if this person is electable, but we’re not acknowledging how differently they get treated, then we’re making it impossible for some candidates to be successful.

ROCHESTER BEACON: What do you say when people point to Barack Obama as an authentic candidate of color who was elected?

RUPERT: I think that with Barack Obama and with Michelle Obama as first lady, what we saw were people who very intentionally and strategically limited how much of themselves we saw. 

I don’t think there was any point that people thought, “Oh, yes, we’re getting Barack Obama at his most real!” When we got glimpses into it, it was an exciting event because there was a sense that he was only ever showing us what he’s allowed to show us in order to be taken seriously. 

That it is not to the faults of any of them, but that means that the next people (of color) that run only have that limited vision to embody. Kamala Harris ran in a lot of ways similar to Barack Obama. But she ran during a time where we were not willing to metabolize her caution as anything but inauthenticity.

Our imagination for what can make an authentic leader when it’s a white man is so much larger because there are so many different versions of leadership that we are comfortable seeing them embody. And there are so few that we are used to and comfortable seeing candidates of color or women of any race embody that.

I think that Zohran Mamdani presents a really interesting way of looking at this. How he finally was taken seriously was that he found other ways to talk to his voters without conforming to what gatekeepers said were going to work.

ROCHESTER BEACON: That’s an interesting point to bring up because I do think the number of candidates doing social media or, as you mentioned before, appearing on podcasts has risen noticeably. Why do you think that is? Who is actually doing well at being authentic through that strategy?

RUPERT: (Podcasts) have started to become almost like the black barbershop tour. The first few times somebody did that, it was like, “Oh, this is smart. You go, you meet people where they are. You’re talking to communities that maybe aren’t like you.” 

And then a few years later, everyone has their tour. Some barbershops now are like, “Yeah, this is when the candidates come through.”  

One of the most frustrating things I have seen more recently is using willingness for Democrats to go on “Manosphere” podcasts (such as Joe Rogan or Andrew Schultz) as a proxy for this question of: “Are you willing to talk to people who don’t already agree with us?” Shockingly, the Democrats who managed to impress these audiences have been white men.

And that’s great, I’m not saying don’t do it. If you can do it, go do it. But that cannot be our proxy for, “Are you willing to be authentic? Are you able to talk to people who don’t agree with you?” Because a lot of those shows cultivated an audience that by its nature is not going to hear that conversation the same way from a woman, from a person of color, or from a woman of color. The audience was cultivated to be, in a lot of these cases, anti-woke.

So if we start using that as the baseline, we’re going to look around and we’re not going to have a very wide pool of candidates. Again, the answer is not saying so I don’t ever do those kinds of interviews. It’s finding different ways to get those messages out to people.

When (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) first started doing those Instagram live videos, there were some other elected officials who were like, “Oh, maybe we should do that.” But you shouldn’t, unless you are also a 36-year-old woman who comfortably gets on Instagram live and cooks, talks to people, and breaks things down for them.

Zohran’s strategy did read as authentic because it makes sense. Social media being the driving communication and narrative force for a 33-year-old is authentic.

It does not strike you the same way for (Andrew Cuomo), a guy in his 70s. If the goal is authenticity, don’t try somebody else’s version of that, particularly if you don’t actually have anything in common.

I mean, I don’t know why Cuomo didn’t just try to go back to doing basically a version of his daily press conferences that he did during COVID that felt like so clearly him at his best. That felt like that was authentically him. 

It’s going to take stepping away from a lot of what we’ve traditionally done. I am hopeful that more candidates respond to this by going, “What is my version of that? How am I most comfortable talking?”

Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.

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