The Racist, Sexist Attacks on Kamala Harris
7 min read
Less than 48 hours after Vice President Kamala Harris won the support of enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, Republican Party leadership had a modest proposal for members: Please stop being so overtly racist and sexist.
“House Republican leaders told lawmakers to focus on criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris’ record without reference to her race and gender,” Politico reported, “following caustic remarks from some Republicans attacking her on the basis of identity.”
Having to make such a request means that it’s already too late. Several Republican members of Congress had by then started referring to Harris as a “DEI hire,” a reference to diversity, equity, and inclusion, but in reality an assertion that Harris is the nominee only “because of her ethnic background,” as Republican Representative Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin put it. The conservative activist Tom Fitton engaged in some neo-birtherism, implying that Harris’s Jamaican and South Asian parents render her ineligible to run for president. The former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway called Harris lazy, saying, “She does not speak well; she does not work hard; she doesn’t inspire anyone.” Republican Representative Harriet Hagemen of Wyoming declared, “Intellectually, [she is] just really kind of the bottom of the barrel.”
Then there were those who fixated on Harris’s gender rather than her race, or on both at the same time. Of course it’s possible to criticize politicians who are women or people or color without that criticism automatically being sexist or racist. That’s not what’s happening here. Right-wing activists on social media criticized Harris’s dating history and accused her of having “slept her way to the top.” The former Trump-administration official Sebastian Gorka told Fox News that Harris was the nominee “because she’s female and her skin color is the correct DEI color.” Other right-wing activists argued that Harris shouldn’t be allowed to be president, “because she doesn’t have biological children.” This sentiment seems to be shared by Trump officials—liberal activists resurfaced a clip of J. D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, attacking Harris, who is married and a stepmother to two, as one of the Democratic Party’s “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.”
Republicans will eventually refine these kinds of race- and gender-based attacks into more coded form, but this is not the same as rejecting them or their underlying premises. Trump-campaign officials told The Bulwark that they were planning to “Willie Horton” Kamala Harris—referring to the 1988 George H. W. Bush ad campaign that sought to foment and exploit racialized fears of crime. The first reason to take note of these attacks now is that they are being made when GOP officials are responding to President Joe Biden’s exit from the race, and are therefore expressing their unguarded thoughts, shorn of the sanitizing message discipline that is sure to follow. They are saying these things because they really believe them. The second reason to take note is that their policy agenda is shaped around these beliefs—which when plainly expressed are repulsive to most voters, even many Republican-leaning ones.
Virtually everything being said about Harris was also said about Barack Obama. Questioning Obama’s citizenship was how Trump became a right-wing hero in the first place. Conservatives called Obama an “affirmative-action president” instead of a “DEI hire” because this was years ago and the right-wing vocabulary was different. They called Obama dumb and lazy just as they are calling Harris dumb and lazy; they called him unqualified and said he achieved what he did only because of his racial background. Harris’s politics might be too liberal for many Americans’ tastes, but she was a district attorney, an attorney general, a senator, and then a vice president. She has not only more experience in elected office than Obama did when he ran, but more than either of the white men running on the Republican ticket.
The purpose of the “DEI hire” rhetoric is to diminish those accomplishments, and suggest that any Black person whom conservatives do not specifically approve of did not earn their place—an inversion of the history of racial discrimination in America such that white people become its true victims and Black people its beneficiaries. The purpose of this rhetoric is to stoke racial resentment by suggesting that few if any Black people have earned whatever success they have achieved, and that their success came at the expense of someone who is not Black. It has become a way to imply that Black people are less capable than white people—the problem is once you simply refer to every Black person in a position of prestige or authority this way, regardless of the circumstances, that sentiment is no longer hidden. Behind this racist fiction that almost every prominent Black figure is a “DEI hire” who doesn’t deserve their position is the reality that the wealthy interests backing Trump’s candidacy are bent on hoarding American prosperity for themselves and deflecting the blame for the economic consequences of their own greed onto others.
That worldview is married to the policy agenda of gutting or reversing antidiscrimination protections for nonwhites, so that discrimination on the basis of race in employment, voting rights, education, criminal justice, and housing can proceed without interference. As The Washington Post reported in 2020, “Trump presided over a sweeping U.S. government retreat from the front lines of civil rights.”
The attacks on Harris for her relationship history or lack of biological children similarly reflect a deeply ideological worldview. Vance deriding Harris as a “childless cat lady” implies that women who do not have children cannot meaningfully contribute to or care about America’s future; it is indicative of a belief that women are human beings valuable not in and of themselves, but only as broodmares, whose primary purpose is as vessels for human reproduction. The underlying insinuation is that women who do not have children do not have value, that blended families are not real families, and that women should be subject to draconian limitations on their personal freedom that men will never face. This kind of rhetoric is also, on a personal level, exceedingly cruel to all those couples who struggle to have children but cannot, to extended family with no biological kids of their own who bear the responsibility of raising children, and even to godparents who take on the duty of rearing children they are not related to.
Vance, like the activists who would staff a future Trump administration, has said that he believes abortion should be “illegal nationally” and that he wants to prevent women from crossing state lines to get the procedure. Notwithstanding misleading media coverage about Trump’s position on abortion, the new GOP platform takes the position that abortion rights violate the Fourteenth Amendment and should therefore be illegal everywhere. As Laura K. Field writes in Politico, Vance has also argued that getting divorced is too easy, a strange position for a man running alongside the thrice-married Trump, but one that is consistent with a totalizing ideological opposition to women’s individual freedom.
Trump’s longevity as a bombastic celebrity has muted the GOP’s ideological extremism to many American voters. Although Trump shares much of that deeply ideological worldview, it is often obscured by the juvenile nature of his schoolyard insults. Expressed in frank, unguarded terms by Republican apparatchiks, however, it becomes creepy and off-putting even to many conservative voters. When that happens, many Republicans find themselves attempting to distance themselves from it, as Trump has tried to do with Project 2025, the policy agenda his staffers intend to pursue if he is given another term in office. The Republican strategy hinges on exploiting racism and sexism, but most Republican voters are not as fanatically ideological about their prejudices as the new Trumpist elite—right-wing lawmakers, staffers, intellectuals, and commentators. There is a reason that abortion rights tend to win popular referendums even in conservative states, and that the Republican leadership is attempting to tamp down all this vocal sincerity regarding Harris’s background.
An ABC News headline reported that Harris “faces racial ‘DEI’ attacks amid campaign for the 2024 presidency,” as though they were falling from the sky like rain and not directed at her by Republicans. A New York Times headline warned that “Trump’s new rival may bring out his harshest instincts,” as though it was Harris’s fault for provoking him by being a Black and South Asian American woman. A Washington Post headline warned that Harris “would have to contend with DEI, culture war attacks,” without naming those doing the attacking. This framing, however well intentioned, assigns less agency to Republicans for this political approach than GOP leaders have.
Harris is not to blame for these kinds of attacks on her. These are simply expressions of the GOP’s values and its policy agenda, which, for this brief moment, is on display in all its ugliness. Republicans are telling the public not just what they believe, but what they want to do with power once they get it: make a world where the remarkable American story of a biracial woman born of immigrant parents becoming president is not possible. You may see Harris’s story as inspiring. They find it grotesque and unjust. They are announcing as much, as loudly as they can. At least until they learn to use their inside voices again.
