A black woman like Harris never had a chance
Sen. Kamala Harris would have been an excellent president. But it was never going to happen. The elephant in the room was just too big.
She is a woman and she is black. And in the aftermath of Donald Trump, she never had a chance at gaining the kind of broad support needed to keep her campaign financially viable. That’s why she abruptly withdrew from the race on Tuesday.
America isn’t progressive enough to elect a black woman as head of state, any more than it was when Shirley Chisholm ran in 1972. It’s questionable whether our country can elect a woman, period.
Though we seemed to be headed in that direction three years ago with Hillary Clinton, Trump’s unexpected victory forced us to take a deep detour that set us back in terms of leveling the playing field for minorities and women in high-stakes elections.
It is impressive, though, that Democrats have provided a platform for a diverse field of candidates to take a shot at the presidency. It gives the illusion that everyone has a fair chance to make it to the top of the ticket, regardless of his or her race, ethnic background, gender or sexual orientation.
But it really is just an illusion. Perhaps we are at a place now where the only person who has a real chance of defeating the old white man in the White House is another old white man. Though most of us abhor that notion, we can’t deny the fact that an African American, a woman or a gay man at the top of the Democratic ticket at a time when the nation is so divided would be risky. A black woman leading the ticket would have been fatal.
This is a nation that sees black women as second-class citizens and treats them accordingly. Black women are at the bottom of the barrel on everything that matters. The unemployment rate for them is nearly double that of white women. When black women do find jobs, they earn significantly less than everybody else.
As a result, they are more likely to live in poverty, making their children more vulnerable to societal ills. Even with all that going against them, they refuse to give up.
Harris is a sharp, competent and committed politician who states her values clearly and fights for them ferociously. She would have been a formidable counter to Trump — smart and quick-witted enough to devour him in a debate.
She is no anomaly, either. Many black women, through hard work, have excelled in politics and other professions in spite of the obstacles, proving time and time again that they are as capable as anyone else of being a leader.
It isn’t Harris’ fault that America didn’t trust her.
Early on, Harris was a frontrunner in the crowded field of Democratic hopefuls. She shot up to her highest point after a testy exchange with Joe Biden over issues of race and school busing during a June debate. She generated a significant amount of buzz that kept mostly white TV pundits talking about her for days. But it eventually fizzled and she never was able to regain her footing.
African Americans, for the most part, were never that enamored with her as a presidential candidate. She consistently fell at the bottom of the heap with black voters, far behind former Vice President Biden, an old white man.
Republicans, including Donald Trump Jr., tried to make her biracial background a campaign issue, suggesting that someone who is half Indian and half Jamaican isn’t really black.
For most African Americans, that’s a nonissue. Barack Obama was biracial too, having been born to a white mother and an African father. Like Obama, Harris strongly identifies as black, and that is good enough for most African Americans.
The reason blacks didn’t support Harris is more complex, but not at all surprising. Black people don’t automatically throw their support behind black presidential candidates just because they are black. Black candidates have to prove they can win, just as white ones do.
Before he won in the overwhelmingly white Iowa caucuses, Obama had a hard time getting black voters to believe in him. Prior to proving he could win the white vote, most black people were with Hillary Clinton. She was a familiar face, and she had Bill Clinton, who had proved he knew how to win a presidential election, by her side.
She was familiar, trusted and proven — just like Biden.
It isn’t that African Americans don’t want another black president. It’s just that voting is sacred to many black people whose parents, grandparents and greatgrandparents were denied the right. It’s not something they are willing to waste on a candidate who has no chance of winning.
Chisholm, the first black woman to seek the nomination from a major party, understood the psyche of the American electorate perhaps better than most. Her focus was on attracting white voters, knowing that she could not be a viable candidate without their support, both financially and in the voting booth.
“I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud,” she said in her historic announcement speech. “I am not the candidate of the woman’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and I am equally proud of that.”
Neither that nor her stellar political record was enough to garner white people’s support. Forty-seven years later, Harris couldn’t do it either.
Of course, Harris is as qualified as anyone to hold the office. But she couldn’t win — not in 2020 America, where racism and bigotry is on full display.
Most black people realized that from the start. Deep inside, as a black woman, Harris must have known it too.