Hunting Where the Ducks Are
At an event hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists today, Donald Trump sparked shrieks of outrage from the press for suggesting that Kamala Harris may not always have been as “black” as she now claims to be. “I’ve known her for a long time indirectly,” Trump said of Harris. “And she was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black. So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she black? … Because she was Indian all the way, and then all of the sudden she made a turn and she became a black person.”
As amusing as the right-on-cue hysterics were — White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre fumed that Trump’s comments were “completely insulting and repulsive” — the talking point about Harris’ “blackness” is part of a broader pattern of quixotic right-wing lines of attack on the presumptive Democratic nominee. (Trump, to his credit, has largely avoided the worst of these; his remark today was largely a passing aside). The Right’s problem is not that it is skewering Harris for her left-wing racialism, or her desire to elevate black interests above those of the nation, or her steadfast commitment to the most poisonous features of the contemporary Left’s hostility to white people; if anything, the Right isn’t emphasizing any of those enough. The Right’s problem is that when it does bring up race, it often does so in a feeble, impotent, and ultimately self-defeating fashion.
As an empirical matter, Harris is half-black, insofar as “black” is an actual racial category denoting Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Her mother is Indian; her father is Jamaican. (A Jamaican immigrant might not qualify as “African-American” according to the broader socio-cultural category of black American identity, but that’s largely irrelevant, for our purposes). Harris attended Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, and was widely touted as the first “black woman” on a major-party presidential ticket in 2020. Various right-wing influencers have obsessively latched onto trying to somehow prove — though it isn’t clear to whom — that she isn’t black, with everything from old headlines about Harris becoming “the first Indian-American senator” to the vice president’s birth certificate. But to what end?
The simple truth is that as a political matter, at least, it literally does not matter whether Kamala is black, or black “enough,” or black in the specific way that she should be black. Black voters are going to vote for her in overwhelming numbers, as they have for every Democrat since (at least) Harry Truman. While there is no public opinion data available on exactly how black the black electorate believes Kamala to be, one suspects that the share of black voters who are suspicious of her racial identity is commensurate to (or lower than) the share of blacks who vote Republican — i.e., 10 to 15 percent, at best. The idea that Kamala might not be black would strike most normal voters, of any and every race, as bizarre. She looks black, she sounds black, and the media says she’s black; for all practical political purposes, she is black, regardless of what the feverish right-wing hunt for her precise genetic admixture turns up.
Insofar as there is a coherent justification for the Right’s quest to disprove Kamala’s blackness, it tends to be presented as a kind of haphazard appeal to black voters. This is why a cadre of prominent black conservative influencers — most of whom derive their income from constantly assuring their predominantly white audience that actually, it’s the Democrats who are the real racists — have latched onto this talking point, implicitly selling their conservative fans on the fantasy that black voters are going to back the GOP en masse: “One of the worst kept secrets is Black voters actually hate Kamala Harris because she is not Black,” wrote self-proclaimed “Iconic OG Black Gay Veteran Republican Icon” Rob Smith. “Kamala isn’t even Black … Why in the f*** would we vote for her?”, declared Lavern Spicer. “Kamala ‘Not Black’ Harris believes that inviting Megan Thee Stallion on stage to shake her bottom … will win her the black vote,” sneered C.J. Pearson. “DOES SHE THINK WE’RE DUMB?”
Even if black voters were convinced by these appeals — and they won’t be — they would vote for Kamala Harris for the same reason that an overwhelming share of Hispanics voted for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012. Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” was (and still is) meant to tap into the awakening power of the “New America” — the rising tide of blacks, Hispanics, gays, women, and elite white liberals who sought to replace the primarily white, Christian, straight, and male political and cultural establishment that has presided over the nation, in some form or manner, since before the Founding. Constituents within this coalition are united not because a particular figurehead at any given moment looks like them (although that never hurts), but because they share a social, political, economic, and cultural interest in the campaign to wrest power from the hands of the Old America. They have the same enemies, and for that reason, they stick together, no matter how much energy the Right expends trying to persuade them otherwise.
But the Right continues to devote an inordinate amount of time to trying to persuade them anyways, because many members of the conservative establishment have — perhaps unbeknownst to them — internalized the premises and formulas of the Left, even as they publicly rage against them. Republicans are desperate to be “diverse,” and are embarrassed by the overwhelming whiteness of their political base. (In his post-Congress apology tour, Kevin McCarthy routinely repeated the complaint that Democrats “looked like America,” while Republicans looked like “the most restrictive country club in America”). They are so eager to avoid being accused of “racism” that they often willingly commit acts of political self-immolation to prove as much, only to find — to their astonishment — that the Left still accuses them of racism anyways.
The good news is, whenever the GOP (and the Right more broadly) decides it would like to win again, there is still a mass political constituency waiting for them out there in the hinterlands. If conservatives want to hunt, they should go where the ducks are.
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