We have seen the attacks on Harris before
Within hours of learning that Vice President Harris might lead the Democratic presidential ticket, Donald Trump called her “Dumb as a Rock.”
A few days earlier, former Trump adviser and radio host Sebastian Gorka referred to Harris as a “female Black diversity hire.” Kellyanne Conway, another former Trump adviser, said Harris “does not speak well. She does not work hard. She should not be the standard-bearer for the party.”
“The only reason she is in the White House,” said Fox News host and cheap-shot artist Jesse Watters, “is because of the DEI deal Biden cut with (Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.), to seal the nomination.”
And so it goes as the presidential campaign slogs toward Election Day. Efforts to marginalize Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, as an unqualified underachiever who got to where she is because of her skin color will never end. And that’s because the denigration of Black people as inferior lies at the heart of the belief in White supremacy that still infects some American souls.
The appetite of Harris’s right-wing detractors for racial derogation has a long history.
Think back to 1898, when Rep. John Sharp Williams, D-Miss., said, “You could shipwreck 10,000 illiterate white Americans on a desert island, and in three weeks they would have a fairly good government, conceived and administered upon fairly democratic lines. You could shipwreck 10,000 negroes, every one of whom was a graduate of Harvard University, and in less than three years, they would have retrograded governmentally; half of the men would have been killed, and the other half would have two wives apiece.”
That turn-of-the-20th-century racism is with us today. Words can be weapons, too.
But Gorka is dead wrong. Kamala D. Harris is nobody’s “hire.” She was elected district attorney of San Francisco, elected attorney general of California, elected U.S. senator and elected vice president of the United States.
Harris earned those jobs the hard way. She put her vision, skills and judgment before the voters and let them decide. And, yes, like other achievers of a darker hue, Harris has had to overcome the odds and obstacles thrown in her way, such as Conway’s hoary slur that Harris is lazy and doesn’t know how to speak.
I submit that Harris spoke well enough, and worked hard enough, to successfully prosecute child sexual assault cases. She spoke well enough, and worked hard enough, to win massive settlements for people whose homes have been unfairly foreclosed on, and students and veterans who had been exploited by a profit-making education company.
Listen to know-it-all pundits as they question the vice president’s political acumen because she withdrew from the 2020 Democratic presidential race before the primaries began.
They say nary a word about the prowess of another California elected official, Ronald Reagan, who sought the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, lost 11 of 13 primary contests and ended up at the convention with hardly any delegates. Reagan was left in the dust as Richard M. Nixon waltzed to the nomination.
There’s also no mention of Reagan’s illfated 1976 bid for the GOP nomination. He promptly lost his first five primaries and ended up losing his party’s nomination to President Gerald Ford. Of course, Reagan went on to score a landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in 1980. And he racked up another landslide win over Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, in the 1984 presidential race. Reagan was a two-time loser before hitting his stride against Carter. Meanwhile, Harris, who recognized the shakiness of her campaign for the 2020 Democratic nomination and had the good sense to make a course correction by dropping out, gets dismissed as a political failure — even before the first vote was cast.
The slander that people of Harris’s ancestry are lazier (per Conway), less intelligent (per Trump) and less devoted to country (“a radical California left winger,” as Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida called Harris) than others has a life of its own.
Trump’s belittling also has a special purpose. He tipped his hand during his 2016 presidential campaign, when he said, “You have to brand people a certain way when they’re your opponents.” He knows what he’s doing.
Why reprise the spirit of John Sharp Williams, why echo the malice of today’s political right? We elders have heard it all before. Some of us have also been on the receiving end. It’s not about us.
This is a heads-up to the energized and enthusiastic young voters who are now being drawn to the Harris campaign in huge numbers.
You are going to see your candidate subjected to the most blistering, vile and specious personal attacks based on her race and gender. The effort, to be sure, is aimed at villainizing her with those who are undecided. But it’s also intended to tear her down in your eyes; to distract and demoralize you; to dampen the high spirits that are driving you toward the one goal that is above all this presidential election year — winning — which depends on voting. Let nothing stop you from getting voters to the polls. Because Election Day 2024 will decide who will govern and uphold democratic values.