The ugly calculus behind MAGA’s racist and sexist attacks on Harris

They try to undercut her legitimacy — and stoke fears about women of color in power.

by Li Zhou

Jul 29, 2024, VOX

Vice President Kamala Harris attends an NCAA championship teams celebration on the South Lawn of the White House on July 22, 2024, in Washington, DC. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images


Li Zhou is a politics reporter at Vox, where she covers Congress and elections. Previously, she was a tech policy reporter at Politico and an editorial fellow at the Atlantic.

In their opening wave of attacks on the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee, some Republicans are homing in on Vice President Kamala Harris’s race and gender — despite certain party leaders’ pleas for them to steer clear.

Members of the religious right have dubbed her a “jezebel,” while other conservative activists suggested that she’s slept her way to the top by citing past romantic relationships she’s had. GOP commentators have also echoed many of the same “birtherism” attacks that were once used against former President Barack Obama, falsely claiming that her candidacy isn’t viable because her parents were Jamaican and Indian immigrants. (Harris is a US citizen who was born in California.) And they’ve tapped into common GOP talking points about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), implying that Harris isn’t up for the job and was selected for VP solely because of her identity.

“The media propped up this president, lied to the American people for three years, and then dumped him for our DEI vice president,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) said in a post on X. (Burchett has since said he wishes he hadn’t said this, while adding that it’s the “truth.”)

There is a common thread in all these attacks: They take aim at Harris’s identity, rather than her agenda or experience.

And they come despite the fact that last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson implored his party to focus their criticisms on policy and politics. “This is not personal with regard to Kamala Harris, and her ethnicity or her gender have nothing to do with this whatsoever,” Johnson said.

Many of these remarks are simply hateful and examples of misogynoir, a compounded form of sexism and racism directed at Harris, a Black and South Asian woman.

But there’s a sinister political calculus to them as well. Collectively, they aim to undercut Harris’s legitimacy as a candidate and are one prong of sweeping critiques Republicans have made about her eligibility. Plus, they strive to leverage existing racism and sexism against Harris, activating voters who share those biases.

“They hope to taint her with the suspicion of not having earned the positions she has achieved and harness the fears of those who resent seeing women and people of color in elite spaces,” says Juliet Hooker, a Brown University political scientist and author of Black Grief/White Grievance, a book on race and politics.

The MAGA attacks try to question Harris’s legitimacy

The throughline across the attacks against Harris is that they utilize aspects of her identity to argue that she isn’t suited for the job.

In a thread on X, Nina Janckowicz, an expert on disinformation who’s published the book How to Be a Woman Online and who ran the short-lived Biden administration initiative on this issue, noted that there are consistent threads that have emerged in past statements, which she evaluated as part of a 2020 study. Other experts, like Melanie Smith, director of research for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, have noted, too, that women of color bear the brunt of this type of abuse.

These statements include implications that Harris is promiscuous and that she’s weaponized her sexuality to get to where she is — a misogynistic claim that’s often used against successful women to question whether they deserve the position that they’re in. Such attacks have manifested in conservative references to her past relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and repeated offensive taglines like “Joe and the Ho.”

That’s often paired with questions about why Harris hasn’t had any biological children, and how that discredits her from being a leader due to claims that she’s not sufficiently invested in the country’s future. Beyond the fact that this line of attack is incredibly dismissive of the role of stepparents in America (Harris is the stepmother to a son and daughter), these sexist statements both superimpose traditional expectations on women and seek to undermine the VP by arguing that she doesn’t conform to those standards.

Racist narratives, including “birtherism” style attacks that question Harris’s citizenship status, similarly seek to cast doubt on whether she’s eligible for office. It’s part of a long tradition of conservatives portraying nonwhite politicians as short of “real Americans” and therefore not fit to hold these positions.

And statements referring to Harris as a “DEI candidate” also intend to poke at her qualifications and ignore the significant experience she’d bring as a nominee.

Those remarks stem from Biden’s statement committing to selecting a woman as his number two when he ran for office in 2020. He then narrowed his final list of contenders to include four Black women. Those choices were intended to improve representation and diversity at the highest levels of the party, which had never previously had a Black woman as president or vice president. Republicans, however, have seized on his decision to suggest that Harris was picked only for this reason, and not because she also brought significant qualifications including decades of experience as a legislator and prosecutor. Such monikers are so demeaning because they suggest that people of color are undeserving of the roles they get, and “implies that [they] can only succeed when we are needed to fill quotas, and not because of merit, hard work or talent,” writes Variety’s Clayton Davis.

The misogynoir directed at Harris aims to suggest that she’s somehow illegitimate as a candidate, and signals to people who hold these biases that the GOP is a home for them. Democrats have been guilty of such rhetoric toward Harris, too, says Howard University political scientist Keneshia Grant, who notes that calls from some party donors about selecting other presidential candidates than her included variations of these same themes.

The recent MAGA onslaught, in particular, however, points to how focused Republicans have been on activating white, male grievances — and exploiting fears of women and people of color obtaining more power.

“White supremacy is above all a powerful organizing construct,” Grant told Vox. “The GOP repeatedly makes these claims that we can’t succeed together in a society, that one group absolutely has to be failing, and that one group is absolutely stealing from another.”