Vice President Kamala Harris has embraced a variety of vibes during her still nascent 2024 campaign, but one area where she restrains herself is discussing her race and gender. She doesn’t mention it much on the campaign trail. During her nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention, she declined to call attention to those identities outside the typical introduction politicians give when describing where they come from. In recent campaign ads, Harris is described as the middle-class “daughter of a working mom.” The class description renders her ordinary, and there is no attempt to pique interest over the historic implications of her candidacy as a woman of color.
Harris’ reluctance to draw extra attention to her womanhood or her Black and South Asian ancestry has stood in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. At the Democratic National Convention that year, a video screen displayed a montage of all past presidents, and then Clinton emerged to the sound of shattering glass. “I can’t believe we have just put the biggest crack in that glass ceiling yet!” she said in the video, prompting the crowd to erupt into roars. During her nomination acceptance speech, she wore a white pantsuit in a nod to the suffragettes, and she trumpeted how her nomination marked a “milestone” for women. Clinton’s most memorable campaign slogan, “I’m With Her,” highlighted her gender — and nothing else.
Harris' victory wouldn’t in and of itself usher in widespread change for people from marginalized backgrounds. Only policies can do that.
Harris’ choice to go a different path is wise — and she should stay the course. The uniqueness of her identity as a presidential candidate is self-evident, and she should continue to let Republicans, who’ve come up with a preposterous new birther theory, hang themselves with their own rope with their bigoted fixation on her gender and racial background. But beyond tactical questions, Harris’ lack of interest in drawing attention to the “historic” nature of her candidacy is substantively appropriate, too. Harris’ victory wouldn’t in and of itself usher in widespread change for people from marginalized backgrounds. Only policies can do that.
This isn’t an argument that Harris should conceal or whitewash her identity. Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, should feel free to discuss and cherish any aspect of her background, just as any citizen in our multicultural democracy should feel free to. And if the context calls for it, it makes sense for her to elucidate how her identity helps explain her ideological outlook. Harris did this artfully in her DNC speech by recounting how her mother, a “5-foot-tall brown woman with an accent,” was sometimes mistreated but “never lost her cool” and taught Harris to “never complain about injustice but do something about it.” Her recollection of another lesson from her mother hints at her own “show, don’t tell” attitude toward discussing her identity: “‘Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.’”
What’s less advisable is making her identity a rallying cry. It may excite certain voters to know they’re contributing to a historic “first” and helping normalize the idea of women and people of color in top positions of power. But other constituencies will be indifferent to — or possibly even alienated by — such messaging; the point of an election is to fix voters’ problems, not help a candidate accrue historical acclaim.
And in a contest wherein one is trying to win over as many voters as possible across every demographic in the nation, what is the value-add of emphasizing to voters something that they can already observe with their own eyes? This is all the more important in light of Harris’ abbreviated campaign, which will be only three months long. Her chief responsibility is to explain what she believes and what she plans to do with her power if elected. Emphasis on “firsts” can flip the focus from voters onto the candidate. Consider how Clinton’s deplorable “I’m With Her” slogan got it backward: The president is supposed to be with us, not the other way around.
In addition to its weakness as a communications strategy, a fixation on “firsts” can effectively conflate cultural change with political change. To be clear, it would, of course, be symbolically powerful and exhilarating to elect a woman as president. But ultimately the excitement over electing “firsts” rests on a theory of change that holds that “inspiration” and “hope” are significant mechanisms for societal progress. They’re not. Electing a woman president isn’t going to be the missing piece that solves the persistent problem of the gender pay gap, gender inequality in parental leave, the absence of government support for child care, the erosion of abortion rights, gender discrimination in the workplace and many other issues. (Fortunately, Harris — in alignment with the Democratic Party — holds decent policy positions on some of those issues, but it remains to be seen what policies she would actually look to pass or make a priority.)
While having a woman as president is long overdue, it is hardly a corrective to institutional patriarchy and misogyny in many nations: Many deeply, deeply patriarchal countries that make the U.S. look like a feminist paradise have already been led by women. Consider also how many liberals framed the the election of Barack Obama as a continuation of the civil rights era and a major blow to racism. But his tenure didn’t usher in a new era in Black liberation or antiracism in America. His favoritism for banks over the people resulted in a huge decline in Black wealth. And many of the people who once voted for him subsequently became decisive contributors to the election of a white nationalist president who went on to call some of the people at a white supremacist rally “very fine people.”
Lastly, unfortunately we know that Harris’ gender and race will remain salient in the race for the White House regardless of what she says, in large part because of whom she’s running against. Trump is making up lies about her denying that she’s Black, deliberately mispronouncing her name and lobbing sexist attacks at her, such as saying world leaders would view her as a “play toy.” JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has defended past remarks referring to her as part of a group of Democratic “childless cat ladies.” Harris has savvily framed Trump’s comments as retrograde, divisive and disrespectful.
One hopes Trump's prejudiced lines of attack against Harris will hurt him. Polls have shown that Trump’s most blatantly bigoted remarks about politicians in the past have been unpopular, such as when he told Democrats of color to “go back” to the places they came from. It’s possible that if Trump continues these kinds of broadsides, he could turn off independent voters or generate extra sympathy — and mobilization —for Harris. Harris should, of course, defend herself in whichever terms she wishes to. But she seems to be wisely focusing her energy on explaining to voters why she’s the best choice to defend our multicultural democracy based on her record and her ideas. Should she be elected, her biggest opportunities to help advance the power of women or people of color will come not through her identity, but what she gets done.
