I hate to rain on the parade, but there is something fake about this business of the joy — and not just joy but JOY as Oprah told us last week — surrounding the elevation of Kamala Harris. The problem is that no one is talking about what the joy is really based on and how it could let us down in the end.
Certainly, part of the joy comes from Democrats’ relief at having a candidate who is mentally alert and has at least a chance of winning the election. But that isn’t all of it, and some thought experiments show why.
Imagine if after President Biden stepped down, the party had united around a white male candidate. If the person accepting the nomination last week had been Gavin Newsom, Beto O’Rourke or even Tim Walz, there would have been some joy, sure. But not of the theatrical degree we saw in Chicago. Not too many people in the audience would be crying with joy as they did for Harris.
Let’s take it further. Suppose the nominee were a white woman. There would surely be some joy, of the Hillary vintage. Some, but not like in Chicago. Tearful beaming elation for Amy Klobuchar? Gretchen Whitmer? Kirsten Gillibrand? I really doubt it.
That’s because a good deal of the joy people keep talking about is a result of one fact: that Harris is Black.
Yes, she’s got a big laugh and a casual affect and she seems to be having a good time. But this isn’t anything close to the whole story. Don’t believe me? Run the thought experiment again, but this time picture Stacey Abrams or Michelle Obama accepting the party’s nomination. It’s a lot easier to picture those same joyful tears, isn’t it.
And I don’t mean only the joy among Black people. I mean the instant and torrential elation across the Democratic board — memes, thumbs up from celebrities, “White Women for Kamala” and such. Before she had even laid out a program of any kind. Beyond a few sound bites, she still has barely spoken to the public without a teleprompter.
I’m hopeful about what she will show us, but let’s face it, nothing about Harris just now justifies her being treated as some kind of once-in-a-generation phenom or savior. This is not about substance, but optics. Harris is being received on the basis of a category she fits into rather than who she is as an individual. The thing sweeping so many people up is the idea that her being Black — and a Black woman at that — would in some resonant way shape her presidency. That it would be somehow significant that the president “looks like America.” That Harris’ Blackness would be a meaningful part of “not going back.”
But we have been here before. Or at least I have.
In the run-up to the election of 2008, I was enchanted with the idea that Barack Obama’s Blackness offered some kind of serious promise. I thought the Obamas’ presence in the White House would help to normalize Black success and power in Americans’ eyes. I thought it would temper what I regard as a tendency to overplay the power of racism in modern America and discount the massive progress we have made on the issue.
That didn’t work out. The Obamas were barely unpacked at the White House when the wise word came from legions of the writerly class that the election of a Black man didn’t mean that America was “postracial.” The killings of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, with the assistance of newly pervasive social media, fueled a narrative that being gunned down, especially by cops who would later be exonerated, is a defining aspect of Black existence. A popular idea has been that Donald Trump’s election was a resentful backlash against Obama’s Blackness.
So here we are. Obama was a Black president; it’s hard to see how it ended up making anything better.
There is no reason to suppose that Harris’s color will be any more significant than Obama’s was if she becomes president. We will continue to discuss race and racism in the way that we do now, and smart folks will warn us that her Blackness must not distract us from doing so.
It’s time, then, to evaluate Harris according to — you knew this was coming — the content of her character. When I urged that about Obama in 2008, some people took offense. They didn’t like being told that they were objectifying him. They said I was underestimating Obama’s record of achievement. I eventually fell in with the idea that his Blackness was cool and important. I know better now, and I hope we all do.
I wish Harris well, partly because I sincerely believe that my tween daughter — and possibly our guinea pig — would be a better president than the megalomaniacal, incurious, unqualified lout who is the alternative.
But just as it diminishes Harris to cherish her primarily because she is not Trump, it diminishes her to cherish her primarily because of her skin color and a vague sense of what it “signifies.” We truly honor Harris in fashioning the mental exercise — and it is an effortful one, I know — of assessing her as an individual.
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