Kamala Harris and the Black Elite
9 min read
If you want an illustration of the extraordinary racial progress America has made over the past 59 years, look to the life of Vice President Kamala Harris, who could now become the second Black president.
Born in Oakland, California—a city deeply divided by race, where the Black Power movement gained ground by explicitly rejecting the cause of racial integration—just months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Harris has achieved great distinction in multiracial milieus, where her cultural literacy and deft code-switching have proved enormous assets. In the mid-1960s, Black elected officials almost exclusively represented Black-majority jurisdictions, and a Black presence in elite institutions was exceedingly rare. By the time Harris first won elected office in 2004, in contrast, she had settled in San Francisco, a city with a small and shrinking Black population, where it was essential for her to build a multiracial political coalition.
Harris’s political “launching pad,” according to the Politico reporter Michael Kruse, was “the tightly knit world of San Francisco high society,” which embraced her as one of its own. Harris came of age amid a rapid expansion of economic opportunity for Black Americans, and especially Black women; her ascent reflects the diversification of the American elite and a growing openness to Black political talent among non-Black voters, both developments that are very much worthy of celebration.
One could argue that Harris’s emergence as the Democratic presidential nominee, like Barack Obama’s before her, is a fulfillment of the civil-rights-era promise of racial integration. Consider, for example, the striking racial diversity of her inner circle, which includes her brother-in-law, Tony West, chief legal officer at Uber; Disney Entertainment Co-chair Dana Walden; and of course her husband, Doug Emhoff, an accomplished entertainment lawyer. Harris’s social world is anything but segregated.
Yet there are rival conceptions of racial progress in American life, and the discourse surrounding Harris’s political rise has overlooked a potential vulnerability for the Democratic coalition in the long run—the cultural and ideological distance separating the progressive Black elite from the working- and middle-class Black majority.
Because Blackness has historically been treated as monolithic, informed by a shared experience of persecution and marginalization, scholars and policy makers have long ignored the Black elite and its central role in America’s racial landscape. As a multiracial daughter of skilled immigrants who is very much at home among upwardly mobile professionals, Harris is best understood as a pioneering member of a Black elite that has been powerfully shaped by rising educational attainment, affluence, immigration, and intermarriage.
From 2002 to 2022, for example, the share of Black adults over 25 with a postgraduate degree increased from 5.3 to 10.6 percent. Over the same period, the share of Black families earning $200,000 or more, adjusted for inflation, rose from 3.9 to 8.4 percent. Those gains haven’t erased inequality; the share of Asian and white adults with a postgraduate degree remains significantly higher than that of Black adults (27.1 percent and 15.7 percent respectively), as does the share of Asian and white families earning $200,000 or more (28.1 percent and 18.2 percent). Nevertheless, these numbers speak to the emergence of a large and flourishing Black upper-middle class.
Rising Black immigration from the Caribbean and Africa, meanwhile, has infused the Black American population with self-selected newcomers who are more likely to be high earners than their native-born counterparts. More than one-fifth of Black Americans are either foreign-born or second-generation, and Black newcomers tend to settle in higher-opportunity neighborhoods and regions than Black natives.
And though Black-white interracial unions remain rare, the number has increased in recent years. As the number of interracial unions has increased, so too has the number of mixed births. Although finding detailed demographic information on all multiracial Black households is difficult, a Pew analysis of data from the 2022 American Community Survey shows that they have a median household income 21.2 percent higher than that of monoracial non-Hispanic Black households.
Needless to say, these various social developments don’t perfectly intersect. It is certainly not the case that all high-earning Black adults have postgraduate degrees, are immigrants, or are partnered with non-Black adults. But compared with the Black population generally, the new Black elite, forged in selective colleges and universities, is disproportionately first- and second-generation, intermarried or mixed-race, and suburban.
The distinctiveness of the Black elite could have a number of political implications. One is that as the cultural and socioeconomic distance between the Black elite and the Black majority increases, so too could the power of the Black elite to shape Black political behavior.
No one is surprised when educated and affluent white voters vote differently from working-class white voters. The notion of a Black “diploma divide” is less familiar. Despite considerable ideological diversity among Black voters, the Black electorate has been largely united behind Democratic candidates for decades. For years, the dominant explanation for the persistence of Black political unity has been the idea of “linked fate,” or the notion that Black voters see their individual interests as bound up with the status and well-being of Black Americans as a group. More recently, the political scientists Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird have attributed Black political unity to the practice of “racialized social constraint,” in which some Black individuals work to protect the interests of the group by shaming or otherwise punishing other Black individuals who threaten to defect from the group’s partisan norm. This practice of enforcing group partisan norms occurs through predominantly Black social networks, including in online spaces, such as Black Twitter. If White and Laird are right, the question becomes which Black individuals and communities have the authority to establish group political expectations.
In his 1903 essay on “The Talented Tenth,” the renowned sociologist and civil-rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois envisioned an elite cadre of exemplary Black women and men—an “aristocracy of talent and character”—that would provide the wider Black population with civic and social leadership. Though a man of the left, Du Bois was a frank elitist, who believed that it was “from the top downward that culture filters,” and that in the history of human progress, “the Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth saving up to their vantage ground.” He took for granted that there would be a durable link between this educated ethnic vanguard and the Black masses, and that elite norms and behaviors would trickle down over time. The Black elite would set the agenda for Black advancement, and the Black majority would fall in line.
But as the Black elite grows apart from the Black majority—in its ethnocultural self-understanding, level of education and wealth attainment, and commitment to cosmopolitan ideals—expect its political authority to diminish.
Consider the politics of immigration, a major flash point in the 2024 presidential election. During Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign, she backed a number of progressive immigration priorities, including decriminalizing illegal border crossings, a position that her campaign recently reversed in a statement to Axios. This is one of several issues where a meaningful gap separates college-educated and non-college-educated Black voters. In 2020, before an intensifying border crisis moved public opinion in a sharply restrictionist direction, the American National Election Studies survey found that although 40 percent of college-educated Black respondents favored increasing immigration levels, the same was true of only 27 percent of non-college-educated Black respondents. When asked if immigrants were likely to take away jobs from Americans, 71 percent of non-college-educated Black respondents said they were at least somewhat likely to do so; among college-educated Black respondents, just 53 percent said the same.
Given that the college-educated Black population is more cosmopolitan, affluent, and likely to have recent immigrant ties, it makes intuitive sense that they would be more favorably disposed toward immigration. But those differences in lived experience might also diminish the ability of elite Black political actors to enforce a pro-immigration partisan norm against Black dissenters.
Then there are the differences between the Black elite and the Black majority when it comes to the role of race in public life.
Over the course of her long career in elected office, Harris has not evinced many fixed ideological commitments. But she has been consistent in her adherence to “progressive racialism,” or the belief that the cause of racial justice demands a more vigorous embrace of race-conscious policy making. In the U.S. Senate and the White House, she has championed race-preferential college admissions and hiring programs, environmental-justice initiatives, and cultural-competency training, among other race-conscious policy measures. In this regard, Harris is representative of her class.
Shortly before the Supreme Court ruled against race-preferential college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, a Pew survey found that although U.S. adults opposed them by a margin of 50 to 33 percent, Black adults favored them by a margin of 47 to 29 percent. However, this overall level of support masked a telling divide among Black respondents. Sixty-four percent of Black college graduates backed race-preferential admissions; support fell to 42 percent for Black respondents with some college or less. This wasn’t because a far larger number of non-college-educated Black respondents were opposed to race-preferential admission—it’s because a much higher share said they weren’t sure.
One explanation is that elite discourse has greatly exaggerated the role of racial preferences in redressing racial inequality. For one, only a small fraction of U.S. undergraduates attend colleges and universities selective enough for racial preferences to matter. In a recent working paper, the economists Francisca A. Antman, Brian Duncan, and Michael F. Lovenheim compared underrepresented minority students in four states which banned racial preferences in public higher education to students in states that left preferences in place. Comparing outcomes before and after the bans and between states, they found that prohibiting preferences had virtually no impact on educational attainment, earnings, or employment for Black or Hispanic men, and may even have improved Black men’s labor-market prospects. While banning preferences produced worse outcomes for Hispanic women, in most cases there were also no statistically significant harms to Black women.
Assuming that these findings hold true more broadly, the impact of racial preferences on the life chances of Black Americans appears to have been negligible. Moreover, defending unpopular racial preferences may have made it more difficult to advance other policies that would have done more to foster Black upward mobility. Viewed through this lens, it is not surprising that many middle- and working-class Black voters are indifferent to the fate of race-preferential admissions, or that so many oppose them outright.
Even if we stipulate that race-preferential admissions did not benefit Black Americans as a whole, they did offer concentrated benefits to the relatively small number of Black individuals who were in a position to take advantage of them. A 2023 YouGov / Economist survey found that only 11 percent of Black respondents felt that affirmative action had a positive impact on their lives, or just over half of the 19 percent who felt that it had had any impact at all. But Black women and men who believe deeply in the benefits of race-preferential admissions have been well represented in high-status jobs, and they’ve played an outsize role in shaping the domestic-policy agenda of the progressive left. That could be part of why progressive policy makers have made such a sharp turn in favor of race-conscious policies in the post-Obama era, despite their deep unpopularity.
As Black political unity starts to fade, Harris has a choice to make. Building on the policy agenda she developed for her 2020 presidential campaign and the record of the Biden-Harris administration, the vice president can champion the race-conscious policies that have proved so resonant among the progressive Black elite in the hope that doing so will inspire a renewed politics of Black solidarity. The challenge for this Talented Tenth approach is that the Black voters who have been most receptive to Donald Trump are younger and working-class. These are Black Americans who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s, against the backdrop of rising Black cultural and political influence. They are less embedded in the Black Church, an institution that has played a crucial role in inculcating norms of racial solidarity. And they are not embedded in the modern university, where racial identity and preferences have been most salient. In short, they seem skeptical of the profound racial pessimism so common on the progressive left.
Rather than lean into progressive racialism, Harris could seek to appeal to middle- and working-class voters of all groups, including disaffected Black voters, by downplaying race consciousness in favor of populist and patriotic themes, drawing on the lessons of Obama’s successful 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Doing so would make life more difficult for those of us on the right who oppose Harris’s vision for American political economy and our role in the world—but it would be an encouraging portent of racial progress to come.
