Kamala Harris Is Breaking Barriers. She Just Isn’t Talking About It.
“Ms. Bennett is a contributing editor in Opinion, where she writes about gender, politics and personalities. She reported from the Democratic National Convention.
When Kamala Harris took the stage in Chicago last week, she spoke of her “trailblazer” mother and her encouraging father — “Don’t let anything stop you.” She told of how the sexual abuse of her best friend led her to become a prosecutor. She encouraged people to imagine abortion rights being restored in a Harris presidency. What she did not do, as she described her “unlikely journey,” was state the obvious — and that silence spoke volumes.
As the first Black woman and first South Asian to receive a major party nomination, she was all but expected to talk about her candidacy as a historic first. She could have easily tipped her hat to the galvanizing power of “representation” or referred to the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” that Hillary Clinton had tried so hard to shatter. Some enthusiastic delegates had dressed in suffragist white, but she was not among them. She wore a dark navy suit. That color, too, spoke volumes.
We’re only beginning to grapple with the audacity of what Kamala Harris is doing: She’s trying to take identity politics out of presidential politics. Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Harris is savvy enough to know how important identity is in America today. But if identity is in, gender and racial politics are out. As she put it on CNN on Thursday night, when asked during her first interview as the Democratic nominee to respond to Donald Trump’s attacks on her identity: “Same old tired playbook — next question.”
She aspires to be the first post-gender POTUS. So many American voters loathe being asked to assess their candidates through the lens of gender and race, and they cringe at the performative nature of identity politics — including, yes, Mrs. Clinton and that ever-present glass ceiling, as well as the argument that her supporters were “voting with their vaginas” if they dared to feel inspired by it.
The metaphor may have yielded feel-good empowerment for a while — and lots of clever merch — but we all know the outcome. And how many times can you declare “The future is female,” tattered sign in hand, before it starts to get awkward?
Ms. Harris is a woman, and a Black woman, and a woman of Jamaican and South Asian descent, and the first woman to be vice president. But we know all that. Other people can talk about history; she’ll be too busy making it.
Gender and race are plenty present in this election, of course — and not just in the form of Mr. Trump’s fixation with it. Pollsters predict this will, in fact, be the most gendered election in American history, with young women and men increasingly polarized.
But that doesn’t mean Ms. Harris is about to let herself be sucked into all of that, and she’s wise not to. As Nancy Pelosi put it recently, speaking at an event with former Obama adviser David Axelrod at the University of Chicago: Ms. Harris becoming the first female president “brings tears to my eyes, but not votes to the ballot box.”
“It’s icing on the cake. It ain’t the cake,” she added.
There was a funny moment that crystallized things for me on the first night of the convention: As Mrs. Clinton wrapped up her speech and left the stage, a familiar chorus began to play over the loudspeakers: Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song.”
This was the ubiquitous anthem of Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign — a cringingly earnest, one-hit-wonder that seemed to embody an over-the-top “you go, girl” sentiment of the moment, almost to the point of parody. “Nooooo,” my seatmate groaned, as the dashed hope of Mrs. Clinton washed over us again. It was like instant PTSD.
The truth is, there is a hangover of sorts for those of us who lived through the hope, and then the letdown, of the last eight years.
I, like many women, was energized by Mrs. Clinton in 2016, writing about the message she would send to little girls, donning my “Pussy Grabs Back” T-shirt, delighting in the unabashed solidarity of groups like Pantsuit Nation.
By 2020, there were six women running for the Democratic nomination, and the language of gender solidarity had grown more muted — and, perhaps, more nuanced — but it was still there: in the Democrats calling attention to double standards, talking about “intersectionality” or working to normalize seeing a woman onstage. (Elizabeth Warren often noted how, when she encountered girls on the campaign trail, she would say: “Hi, my name is Elizabeth, and I’m running for president because that’s what girls do.”)
It’s as if Mrs. Clinton, and the women who came after, boxed themselves into identity politics, in effect if not intent. Even those who didn’t play up their womanhood didn’t quite know how to get out of the box.
We know by now, thanks to social science and polling, that women are just as likely to win elections, even as their “electability” seems to be an ever-present question. And yet there is a very real worry that the more attention is paid to a candidate’s gender — whether by the candidate herself, or the public asking questions like, “Is America ready for a woman?” or “Can a Black woman win?” — the more it sows doubt about her ability to win. “It has the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophesy,” the sociologist Marianne Cooper told me.
Ms. Harris’s ability to avoid all that may be as much about her own political instincts as it is about any cultural shift; after all, she has always been a first, in virtually every job she’s held — did she really need to keep talking about it?
“I am who I am. I’m good with it,” she told The Washington Post in 2019. “You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.”
To Vogue, later that year, she explained how, “If someone says, ‘Talk to us about women’s issues,’ I look at them and smile and say, ‘I am so glad you want to talk about the economy’” — a stinging emphasis on “so.”
And this week, when asked about the symbolism of her candidacy — and a viral photo of her great-niece staring up at her as she accepted the nomination — she deftly steered again: “Listen, I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender,” she said.
Still, she has found subtle ways to signal who she is. She has used her mother, a “5-foot-tall brown woman with an accent,” to nod to her heritage. She has relied on political surrogates — Michelle Obama, Mrs. Clinton, Oprah — to hammer home the more identity-driven aspects of her biography, like attending a historically Black university. Her supporters can self-segregate in any way they want, and have — “White Dudes for Harris,” “Cat Ladies for Kamala,” “Moms for Momala” — but she is not the person leading these efforts.
And, anyway, it’s not exactly a secret who she is: From her style of speech, to her family, to the fact that she chose a Beyoncé song as her official campaign anthem (just not the one about girls running the world), she is showing us.
“Quite frankly, I think she’s doing something very clever,” said Carol Moseley Braun, who ran in the 2004 Democratic presidential primary and was the first Black woman to serve in the Senate. “Nobody wants to hear ‘I’m the first, I’m the first, I’m the first.’ What they want to hear is what you’re going to do for them.”
A recent polling experiment seems to suggest that her approach is working.
In a survey of 800 registered voters, Dan Cassino, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University, found that when voters were prompted to think about gender and race — specifically, they were asked whether these things were important to them in a generic candidate — their support for Ms. Harris grew substantially.
And yet the opposite was true during the 2008 primaries, when he conducted a similar study looking at Mrs. Clinton. That signifies some progress — and is perhaps a testament to Mrs. Clinton’s perseverance. But it also implies that Ms. Harris has skillfully cracked the code.
“I would argue that telling people to vote for a candidate on the basis of identity is too explicit,” Mr. Cassino said. “Voters want to think they’re voting for a candidate on the issues, and making identity appeals explicit is going to work against that, and potentially trigger a backlash.”
With that in mind, Mr. Cassino told me, other people drawing attention to Ms. Harris’s identity, as they have been, may in fact be the most effective way of replicating those survey results in real life. But even better, he added, would be to have the opposing candidate do it — because it makes it salient, without overdoing it.
In which case, Ms. Harris has one very strong (albeit reluctant) man working for her. His name is Donald Trump.
Jessica Bennett is a contributing editor in the Opinion section of The Times. She teaches journalism at New York University and is the author of “Feminist Fight Club” and “This Is 18.” @jessicabennett • Facebook
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