The Kamala Harris Conflict

with John McWhorter

Kamala Harris is the first black woman who could plausibly win the presidency. Somehow, I feel as though I should be excited by that prospect. True, I’m considerably to the right of the Democratic party on many issues, but a Harris presidency would confirm that Barack Obama was not a fluke, that the nation has truly moved past one of its major racial hang-ups, and that it was ready to shatter the highest glass ceiling in the land. Those are all reasons for celebration, aren’t they?

But, no, I can’t get excited. I wish I could. I’m slightly embarrassed that I can’t. Perhaps it’s because I simply don’t find anything noteworthy about Kamala Harris, other than her race and gender. I’ve seen no evidence that she is a gifted leader, the kind of epochal figure who could unite a severely divided country. Nor has she demonstrated an unusual mastery of policy or preternatural political instincts. Rather, she appears to be a somewhat ordinary, canny, basically likable politician who, in a different electoral environment, probably would have maxed out her potential for ascendance in the senate. Instead, a not-quite-democratic process has elevated her to within reach of the presidency.

Or perhaps my cool attitude has more to do with what Kamala Harris doesn’t represent. My sympathies for supporters of Donald Trump—if not exactly for the man himself—should be clear by now. The surprising wave of enthusiasm that has greeted her would, in the event of a Harris win, crash down on their heads. I regularly refer to African Americans as “my people” because I feel it in my gut. And yet the tug of racial belonging is not quite enough to pull me over to the Harris ticket. I doubt that I’m alone in feeling this conflict—we’ve seen it in the growing number of black men professing (or confessing) to support Trump. We’ll have to wait until November to see who wins, but I speculate that racial affiliation may not be enough on its own to win over everyone that Kamala Harris needs.

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JOHN MCWHORTER: I, of course, am thinking about the rapid ascent of Kamala Harris into the national consciousness and what it means. What I find especially important on this is that there's the obvious parallel with our first discussions way back in the 1850s, where we were talking about the Obama phenomenon and how I was so excited because I thought it was going to be really special that there was possibly going to be, and after a while was clearly going to be, a black president.

You weren't going for it. Now here we are with that again. I'm older and maybe in some ways wiser, and so are you. I don't know if you feel you're wiser than back then, but what are you thinking of the fact that she could be the next president?

GLENN LOURY: Okay, I think it is a very significant, interesting, historic, profound statement that she could be the next president, because she damn could be the next president. She's fortunate to be running against Donald J. Trump, whose limitations and flaws you are very well familiar with.

I've got an inkling, yes.

She's come almost from nowhere. The vice presidency is not nowhere. Of course it's not. But as I recall, until yesterday, her performance in the vice presidency was roundly denounced not only by partisans on the other side of the aisle but even by some, many Democrats who were quietly making it known that they thought she wasn't the best, the strongest, the most capable person to be backing up Joe Biden and wondered whether or not Biden's reelection prospects were hampered to some degree by her. All these jokes about Biden's insurance policy being Kamala Harris. Nobody's going to kick him out of the job if they think she's the one who's going to succeed him, and all that kind of stuff.

And now she's a tribune at the head of a “movement” of people who are ecstatic, excited, ready to fight. “When we fight, we win.” It's Kamala all day long. I turn on MSNBC, it's Kamala. There's Kamala-boosting everywhere I look. I open my inbox, there's my email, there's Kamala—and now Tim Walz—all day long.

So how'd this happen? Where'd this come from? It's just a fascinating phenomenon. It's got to be like a historically unprecedented kind of ascendancy. It interests me. And of course, as a black guy, I'm interested in the racial dimension of this, the first black woman, et cetera. I am watching with bated breath as this unfolds. And it's all compressed. The election is less than three months away. It's all happening at an accelerated time scale. It's pretty interesting.

So I didn't give you the answer that you wanted. You wanted an evaluation of the candidate, I assume. And I suppose we can get to that but I am intrigued by the drama, the drama of Kamala.

It is an intriguing drama. And I don't know, I'm not viscerally against her in any way. But I'm a little bit disturbed this time. I feel like you did back in the day with Obama. I'm a little bit disturbed by the caliber and the tone of this excitement, given that five minutes ago she was discussed the way you're talking about.

Frankly, it's all because she's a woman and she's black. And I think we can elide all the business of whether she's also Indian, et cetera. Her main identification is African American. She's a black woman. And if it weren't for that, I think people would be much, much less excited. And it might surprise some people to know that I took that line on Obama at first. Way back as early as 2007, I put it forth in various venues, including the New Republic, who I wrote for back then. Evaluate this Barack Obama person on the basis of who he is, what he's done, and what he promises to do, not just his color.

And boy, did I take a drubbing for that. Talk about the comment section here. Some of the worst stuff I ever took [was in the New Republic], where it was the only time I've been criticized in that way and wondered, is this going to affect my media career, were the people who commented in the New Republic and made me sound like a varmint, a scoundrel, an idiot, I'm condescending. One person said something vulgar, I think probably with the word "creaming" or something. “How dare he say that that's the only reason that I like Barack Obama,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But frankly, I was right then. That was it, at first. But I got on the bandwagon. I started to think about what it would really mean for there to be a black president, for there to be a black first couple. And we talked about that, and I did get excited about that. Yeah. I thought that there were some there would be some value just in their sheer presence in such a position.

And to an extent, I was disappointed. Because what really happened is that they got in and what you can call generically the three-named people were desperate, because it was so obvious that it was significant that racism didn't keep a black man from office. And it happened twice. And I don't think they were desperate for their livelihood. They were desperate for their basic sense of psychological wellbeing. What are they if they can't make it sound like 1863 has never passed? All these books and articles about how racism isn't gone, et cetera.

But then life took care of things for them, because it went from there's this permanent glass ceiling on any truly serious black achievement unless you're Colin Powell. Two, if you're black, you get killed by the police just for walking the wrong way or driving the wrong way. And that really takes off. We're now at the tenth anniversary of Ferguson, for example, and also Trayvon Martin, early teens, we have that coming in. And so the idea is whether or not there's a black president, still, existing while black will get you killed by the cops. And that's where we still are today.

I'm done, but I feel ... let's say that Kamala gets in. Okay. We have a woman president and we have a black woman president. But I realize now that the three-name people need that alarmist tone, and so it won't matter. We'll still have the cop issue, for example, and the overly racialized version of that that we see.

Maybe I'm also older, but I'm not as excited this time, because I can see that the Obamas normalized blackness as the top. She would just be more of it and our discussion of race would remain distorted anyway.

How about this? How about 2007-2008 Obama emerges. He gives that speech in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention. Everybody, it's not a black America, not a white America. Whatever he said, he said it very well. Mounted a campaign. I think you have to say he's an underdog running against Hillary Clinton in 2007-2008 for the Democratic nomination. And he kicks her ass. He doesn't do it in a day or a week. He does it as the culmination of a protracted intra-party contestation.

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He beats her out. He outmaneuvers her, the former first lady of the United States of America, who is the first woman running with a really serious chance of getting elected president of the United States. Loses out in a protracted intra-party contest to Barack Obama. He bests her. He puts together a campaign mechanism. It's a billion-dollar enterprise, pretty much from scratch. He hires and nurtures and sustains a staff of really competent and effective campaign people. And he gets himself elected president of the United States.

He writes a best-selling book, Dreams from My Father, before he ascends to the presidency. And he has a vision about relations with Iran, for example. He goes to Cairo and he gives this really important speech shortly after he is elected. He is awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in his first year as president of the United States.

Kamala Harris is no Barack Obama, a person could say. A person could say that while there are some superficial similarities between Kamala in 2024 and Obama in 2008, the differences perhaps are even more important, and those differences do not favor her. And yet, she is the tribune of a movement of the progressive political party in our country, because she's a black woman.

A “black” woman?

Don't do that. But yeah it's very superficial. But then again, most human beings are not political wonks. It's always about much, much more than what a person's actual policies are. And if all of those black sorority sisters are excited about her because she's one of them—and she is, socially, some shared experiences—but if that means that they're going to come out and vote for her and they were going to be less likely to come out and vote for Biden and it means that Trump doesn't become the president, that's the way the social history worked. But I don't know.

What does she stand for? Do you know?

Nobody knows. I'm not sure she knows. She's a politician. She tilts left when she has to, and she tilts a little bit more rightward when it's convenient to. She doesn't seem to me to have any truly strong convictions, like most politicians.

She's a politician. She's a Democrat. But that's about it. I don't think anybody really cares. Okay, there is the abortion issue. That's very important. She has been assigned that, and I'm sure she feels that very deeply. But in terms of having a vision, as we've said before, I don't think she's quite worked that out yet.

It's just what she is. And people, we've said this before, but I think it bears repeating: it's about the fact that there is a warm tribalism that most people feel. And of course it's going to have to do with who becomes the president. “She looks like me,” many people are thinking. And of course, no Chinese student or Chinese-American ever says, “I can't learn this or I didn't join this field because I didn't have a teacher who looked like me.” They've got something behind them where they don't need the teacher to look like them. They feel like they belong to something that looks like them.

But we black people are encouraged to think the person has to look like me. We're getting this in the Olympics as well. And she looks like them. She moves like them. She can use a little black dialect like them. And therefore, that means they are going to support her for president, because it's time for somebody like that to be on top, even though we've already had it happen before. It's not deep. It really isn't. I will be interested to see what she has to say when she does an actual press conference. I wonder what she's going to come up with to present as what she is.

And Glenn, maybe she'll become something. Despite the fact that many people seem to think she's not the brightest bulb on the tree, I don't get it. She's clearly very intelligent. And she just really hasn't had time to become anything, because she was too busy being a vice president who, one, had not been assigned enough things, and two, I don't think was too terribly interested in the job.

Let's see what happens. But all that smiling. Is she happy? And is she happy because she might be about to become president, or is she happy because there are things she wants to do? But showbiz and politics, always. Especially today.

Okay, I know this is wrong. I resent her having been foisted on us and the way in which it happened, coming out of, as it were, nowhere. Of course, she was vice president, and of course, she was the heir apparent. On the other hand, for the reasons that I've already stated, there was something less than fully compelling about her. My own theory is that the party elders, seniors envision a train wreck if she were not to be the candidate based on intra-party squabbling about that. The first black woman, and you're going to pass her over?

On the other hand, an open contestation for the succession of Joseph Biden would have put her in a position where she might not have prevailed, given her weaknesses. And that would have created a problem for the party. So they circumvented that. That is, they circumvented a democratic process of selecting their candidate.

And I feel like I've been played a little bit, that I'm being manhandled a little bit, as a citizen. I'm having something happen that is the deep structure of the hidden hand of power playing itself out, as opposed to some transparent process of deliberation.

And yet I feel a little bit guilty for feeling like that, John. I feel like I should be more enthusiastic, because, somehow, the right thing to do for our democracy and for history's sake is to get behind this woman, the first black woman to arise to the position of president of the United States. My resentment of the process on the Democratic side is the mirror image of sufficient criticism of the Republican side.

I'm a Trump apologist. That's a well-known thing about me. I'm the guy that says, “yeah, but.” When everybody's piling on Trump, I say, “yeah, but.” Yeah, but how much of an idiot could he be if he's, et cetera. What about the people who support him, and so forth? And what about the issues? What about the tectonic plates of American politics shifting that we can see with this embrace of populism and nationalism and America Firstism and whatnot? And don't the coastal elites have a lot to answer for in terms of the neglect of the problems of the working stiffs throughout the middle of the country, many of whom are flocking behind Trump?And you're going to just call those people deplorables? Things like that. And besides, how could he have advanced to the extent that he has advanced if he were an idiot, if he were an imbecile, if he were, et cetera, et cetera.

And so my lack of enthusiasm for Kamala ... is an indirect indicator of my hidden, closeted sympathies for the other side. That was what I was gonna say. And I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed of that.

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