Opinion
Erika D. Smith
Bloomberg
Tuesday - 27 August 2024
For all the talk about how Kamala Harris may become the first woman of color elected president, one person most definitely isn’t talking about it: Kamala Harris.
Not on the campaign trail, where her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, continues to lob racist and sexist attacks her way. And not in the 38-minute speech she gave at last week’s Democratic National Convention. When the vice president officially accepted her party’s presidential nomination, she didn’t directly mention her race, gender or the historic nature of her candidacy.
Whether this is a political calculation, a personal calculation, or both, it says something about this moment in America. Two decades after Barack Obama gave his now famous keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, forever changing the national discourse around race and power, the candidate long seen as his political heir is willing to let the fullness of her identity speak for itself — and people of color and women are OK with that.
“The world will never let you forget that you are a Black woman, so she doesn't need to profess or wear a sticker on her shirt,” explained Harris’ longtime friend, California Senator Laphonza Butler, who is the only Black woman serving in the upper chamber.
I heard similar statements from Democrats on the convention floor last week, including from Harris’ fellow members of the historically Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha and fellow graduates of her alma mater, Howard University. Other women of various races and ethnicities in suffragist, white outfits said the same, while also praising Harris’ advocacy of reproductive rights. All of them felt proud and seen.
But Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, have decided to campaign on universal values of freedom and opportunity, particularly for the middle-class, rather than narrower pitches tethered to identity politics. They’re promising to be leaders for “all Americans” in a patriotic, pluralistic democracy.
“I see an America where we hold fast to the fearless belief that built our nation and inspired the world,” Harris said in her acceptance speech, drawing cheers. “That here, in this country, anything is possible. That nothing is out of reach. An America where we care for one another, look out for one another and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us — none of us — has to fail for all of us to succeed.”
This is progress, I think. But it’s also a twisted kind of progress.
On the one hand, political candidates no longer need to stuff themselves into demographic boxes, proving they are Black enough, for example, to get elected. On the other hand, those same candidates can no longer explain what it means to be Black — or a woman — without risking losing an election. This a double-edged sword that has long existed in American politics, and it has only grown sharper over the past two decades.
Harris has not done that, and that’s very smart of her.”
Obama also tried to avoid “playing the race card” — so much so that he was sometimes criticized, particularly by Black people, for trying to avoid acknowledging race and racism altogether. Nevertheless, as a freshman senator from Illinois, his soaring oratory inspired Americans of all backgrounds to participate in the “politics of hope,” rather than the politics of cynicism and division.
“There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America,” he said in 2004. “There’s the United States of America.”
How Harris chooses to talk, or most likely not talk, about race and gender will be telling in a close presidential race. It could make all the difference as she and Walz try to win over new and independent voters in crucial swing states.
During Harris’ last run for president four years ago, she modeled her campaign logo after one used by Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to seek the Oval Office. When she accepted the nomination for vice president later that same year, she proudly praised and compared herself to other Black women who broke glass ceilings.
Times have changed, though. Rather than being loud and proud, the thinking in 2024 encourages politicians — to quote Jools Lebron, my favorite TikTok influencer of the moment — to be very mindful, very demure about their identities.
While many voters now accept that race and gender-based inequities exist, they also don’t want to hear about them because they also believe they no longer matter as much. A recent ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll found that 47% of Americans are indifferent to the gender of the president.
I’m still skeptical. And the Harris campaign clearly is too.
Harris is now doing a two-step that may be familiar to Obama and is built, perhaps, on a lesson from her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, that she shared in her DNC speech. “Never let anyone tell you who you are,” Harris’ mother told her. “You show them who you are.”
Bloomberg
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