Pop Culture Failed to Imagine Kamala Harris
“There will be a resistance to your ambition. There will be people who say to you, ‘You are out of your lane,’ because they are burdened by only having the capacity to see what has always been instead of what can be.”
That was Kamala Harris, earlier this month, speaking at the Black Girls Lead conference. She was talking about the American status quo. But she was also acknowledging a more particular set of circumstances: the stories that had been published and aired about her over the previous months, as Harris was discussed as a potential running mate for Joe Biden. The stories commented breezily on Harris’s loyalty, her authenticity, her palatability. They quoted Senator Chris Dodd griping that after Harris trounced Joe Biden during a primary-season debate, she had been insufficiently apologetic about the victory. They quoted Ed Rendell, a friend of Biden’s, complaining without evidence of Harris’s tendency to “rub people the wrong way.” They treated Harris’s intelligence not as an asset, but as a kind of condescension. They treated her career successes as evidence of opportunism. They whispered, basically, “You are out of your lane.”
They were wrong, it turns out, in several senses. Yesterday evening, the Biden campaign that Harris will serve as his running mate in the 2020 presidential contest. The news—particularly because Harris could be, if elected, —is a big and important step forward for American politics: Harris will be only the third woman in U.S. history to serve as a running mate on a major-party presidential ticket. She will be the first woman of color
