What Harris Learned From Obama About Racism
She's treading even more carefully than he did.
There are two reasons why Donald Trump and other Republicans would react to Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee for president with an eruption of race-baiting:
They think it’s an effective campaign tactic
They just can’t help themselves
Both can be true, of course, and that’s undoubtedly the case with Trump himself: Not only is he a bigot, he has an unswerving faith in the darkness of the American heart. So while his congressional and media allies call Harris a “DEI hire,” he offers his unique take on intersectionality, pretending not to understand how Harris can be both Black and Indian-American, though he surely wants voters to think either one is reason enough to reject her.
What we haven’t considered is how Harris will react to this flood of sewage from Trump and his allies — because it’s not going to stop.
What’s her theory on how she should handle the racism that’s already coming her way? It’s still early, but so far, Harris’ response to the racist attacks from her opponent is to ignore them. If you look at the speeches she’s giving, she says almost nothing about what it was like to grow up biracial in America, or what the ongoing conservative racism represents, or how her identity ought to affect the way people look at her and imagine her in the Oval Office.
Since she isn’t talking about it explicitly, it’s hard to know precisely what her calculation is. But it’s reasonable to surmise that she looked carefully at how this issue played out for Barack Obama, and came to some conclusions about what she might do differently. As much as liberals might like her to stand up and say “Donald Trump is a racist!” she’s not going to. She saw how difficult it was for Obama to navigate the minefield any ambitious Black politician must traverse, and she has learned the lessons of his presidency.
What Obama’s experience is teaching Harris
No one was ever better equipped to cross that territory than Obama, who spent much of his life working out how to make himself as simultaneously appealing and unthreatening as possible to White people. He was calm and cool (never angry!), friendly and conciliatory, always looking to find common ground and show people that he understood where they were coming from even if he disagreed.
As he began his 2008 run for the White House – when it still appeared that Hillary Clinton was the nearly inevitable nominee – conservatives fell all over themselves to praise him for being the kind of Black politician they had been waiting for. “He never brings race into it,” gushed pundit and former cabinet secretary William Bennett when Obama pulled off a surprise win in the Iowa caucuses. “He never plays the race card. Talk about the Black community – he has taught the Black community you don’t have to act like Jesse Jackson, you don’t have to act like Al Sharpton. You can talk about the issues. Great dignity. And this is a breakthrough.”
That kind of “credit to his race” rhetoric was common at the time, and Obama didn’t exactly discourage it. He was the racial synthesis, born of Kansas and Kenya to offer America deliverance into a bright future we could all feel good about. But once it appeared that he might actually win the Democratic nomination, the tributes from Republicans disappeared; now Obama was the new Malcom X. It started in earnest with the discovery that his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, had spoken a little too forthrightly about America’s history of racism, which created the opening they were looking for. “You start getting a sense of who he is, and he’s not the Obama you thought. He’s not the Tiger Woods of politics,” said GOP adman and experienced race-baiter Alex Castellanos, explaining the opening that had been created. “You don’t have to say that [Obama is] unpatriotic; you don’t question his patriotism,” said Chris LaCivita, giddy over videos showing Wright condemning America’s sins. “Because I guaran-damn-tee you that, with that footage, you don’t have to say it.” (LaCivita — who also masterminded the vile “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” campaign in 2004 — is currently running Donald Trump’s campaign.)
To change the story and reassert his status as the Black man who understood White people, Obama made a much-touted speech on racism full of empathy for White resentment, but it made no impact with his critics. And once he was elected, the naked racism from the right, especially media figures like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, was like the unceasing buzz of a thousand hornets. So throughout his presidency he avoided the subject as much as possible. “I’m not the president of Black America,” he said.
And on those rare occasions when he was moved to say even the most obvious things – that the Cambridge, MA police “acted stupidly” when they arrested renowned scholar Henry Louis Gates for allegedly trying to break into his own home, or that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” Martin, killed by a thuggish self-appointed neighborhood watchman – the right’s response was absolutely volcanic. How dare he?!?! they cried.
It wasn’t bad enough that he had the temerity to be Black every day, he had to remind them of it too? “He took race back to the ’60s, as far as I’m concerned. He made everything a race issue, or at least saw it through a racial lens,” said Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator who was then president of the Heritage Foundation. “The country had moved toward bending over backward to create equality. But then suddenly, with Obama, he just lit the fires.” So ungrateful.
Harris knows this history
Kamala Harris understands this history well. So she may have come to the conclusion that there is little if anything to be gained if she herself addresses race, and the racist attacks on her, too directly. She can let her allies and surrogates fight that fight, calling out the naked bigotry from Trump and his campaign. The closest she’ll come, as she did after Trump questioned her Blackness, is to say “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strength.”
You’ll notice that that sentiment — either banal or profoundly true, depending on how you look at it — isn’t about her at all. Unlike Obama, she is not offering herself as proof of our country’s greatness (“In no other country on earth is my story even possible,” he said), or proof of any grand idea. Does she want her own supporters to be moved and motivated by the prospect of electing America’s first woman president, its second Black president, and its first Indian-American president? Absolutely. But when she speaks in her own voice, she’s going to tread very carefully.
That won’t stop the racism, but it may give it a little less bite. That’s the theory, anyway.
Disclaimer: no one is enlisting me as a strategist. However, I am unconvinced that the described approach will reduce the bite of [lethal] racism. That we are still h-e-r-e, 8 yrs after Obama, suggests that we have much more work to do to defang/neutralize racism. CRT was not a threat, but Rs were allowed to manipulate it into one. I/fWhen done, there's [lethal] misogyny.