Kamala Harris Has Never Done Anything Wrong
Are you coconut-pilled, leaning into fascism, or maybe just not as progressive as you think you are?
Today is the 129th anniversary of the First National Conference of Black Women of America
When Vice President Kamala Harris confirmed that she was running for President of the United States following Joe Biden’s announcement that he was stepping down, the journalists and political pundits that I followed all clamored to post their opinions.
My media diet ranges from progressive to leftist, so the news ranged from celebration, to criticism, to relief, to skepticism. One of the first videos I watched was former public defender Olayemi Olurin’s off the bat takes about Kamala’s career. She makes the common observation that the democratic party has waited until the 12th hour to select a nominee that would’ve performed much better than Biden, whose criticisms have risen in the last year. The speculation on his competence due to his age started long before June 27th, and his record in continuing the legacy of America’s military support for Israel as they continue to carry out an ethnic cleansing hasn’t helped, especially in states with high American Muslim populations like Michigan.
Olurin states that she doesn’t think that Kamala can win because “this is a shallow, prejudiced, silly country. The kind of country where they say stupid shit like ‘they’d elect a man for president who they feel like they could drink a beer with.’ Kamala is also a biracial woman, and her biracial is different than Barack Obama’s biracial. On top of that, she’s a woman of color who’s “married to a white man and has no children of her own.” She states that if liberal voters think that Kamala has the same chance as Hilary Clinton, who won the popular vote in a landslide but still lost the electoral college, then they are delusional. She speculates that Harris won’t be able to mobilize the black vote because of the reasons stated above, but also because of her record as a prosecutor.
Olurin emphasizes that the opinions that she’s expressing aren’t hers, but the opinions of voters and pundits who are actively participating in these conversations. After her analysis, she makes her own opinion clear:
I'm a former public defender and an abolitionist so I'm no fan of Kamala Harris and I do have a very nuanced and serious problem with the rise of black tough on crime politicians and superficial wins that do nothing to truly advance black people and I wonder what kind of negative impact the first black woman president being a former prosecutor would have on the generations of black women that would inevitably inspire to take a similar road but that's a much larger conversation for a different time.
In an Instagram Reel from July 8th, cultural critic Kimberly Nicole Foster posted snippets of her livestream from July 5th where she criticizes Harris. Foster claims that in 2020, Harris had to soften her tough on crime, hardline image to become the progressive candidate that progressive voters we’re asking for, namely from Bernie Sanders. Foster says that in the contradictory nature of her career record as a prosecutor and her progressive campaign, she came off like an airhead, which we all know she isn’t.
Well, this got the people going.
A Tiktok account called @2RawTooReal, ran by Kenneth Walden, called Foster out, saying that they were giving her a chance to retract her statements because she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.
This video piqued my interest as an avid viewer of Foster’s content. So, I sat through the 7 and ½ minutes of yelling. First, Walden attempts to dispel the idea that Harris was tough on crime. They then name the Biden-Harris administration’s accomplishments in “economic justice” which include the child tax credit and student loan forgiveness, but then incorrectly state that “now thanks to the Biden Harris administration they cannot report to the credit bureau your medical debt.” This is still under review by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it will be open for comments until the 12th of August, and has the potential to take effect by next year at the earliest.
Walden then goes on to state that Kamala wasn’t trying to appeal to voters during the protests in George Floyd’s name in 2020. She coauthored and cosponsored the George Floyd justice and policing act before she was even on the ticket with Biden. I’m not sure why it’s surprising or a gotcha that a politician who was running for president on a progressive platform in 2019 would then support a bill opposing police brutality and systemic racism1, but sure, alright. I also don’t understand how “tough on crime” is contradictory to police oversight, in my mind the two run parallel to each other. The bill introduced by Senators Harris, Bennet, and Booker would, if anything, criminalize the actions of offending officers.
The video is captioned “Time to nip this Kamala Harris is a cop narrative in the butt right now”2. This is in reference to Harris’ reputation, which has been tennis balled back and forth in the media. Is she soft or tough on crime? Walden argues that Harris has been, as she put it, “smart on crime.” But the narrative is one that Kamala created herself. According to the Sacramento Bee
She touted that reputation at the last Democratic National Convention, telling a New York delegation breakfast “I now stand before you as the top cop of the biggest state in the country.”
And later
In her 2010 book, “Smart on Crime,” she wrote, “If we take a show of hands of those who would like to see more police officers on the street, mine would shoot up. A more visible and strategic police presence is a deterrent to crime, and it has a positive impact on a community.”
The video debunks some important misconceptions about Kamala’s record, like that she personally made efforts to keep black inmates in jail. Again, as the Sacramento Bee reported:
While the San Francisco Police Department was responsible for running the lab, not Harris’s district attorney office, a court ruled in 2010 that the district attorney’s office violated defendants’ constitutional rights by not disclosing what it knew about the tainted drug evidence. Judge Anne-Christine Masullo wrote in her decision that prosecutors “at the highest levels of the district attorney’s office knew that Madden was not a dependable witness at trial and that there were serious concerns regarding the crime lab.
So, if anything, you can chalk that incident up to bad leadership and poor oversight, not a personal vendetta Harris had against black people in general.
Political media consistently observes Harris as being a follower instead of a leader on issues, which is something activists, namely Black and Latino activists have criticized her for. Depending on where you sit on the left, “progressive prosecutor” is an oxymoron. She’s done some great things, but she’s also been slow to act and has gone against the best interests of people of color3. During her campaign in 2019, she waffled through questions, campaign slogans, and her main platform4. In the Biden-Harris administration, she did the work Joe didn’t want to do, and that’s basically the job of any Vice President.
Long before the bratification of the #K-Hive, there were video compilations of her laughing and out of context clips of her sounding like she doesn’t know how to string more than three sentences together. But the bipartisan perception that Kamala was not to be taken seriously has meme-ified her career in recent history. Which is likely why Foster described her as coming off as airheaded, even though we know she’s not.
This is my main issue with the video: Walden doesn’t really engage with what Foster is saying, they’re more so using Foster’s reel as a vehicle to list Harris’ accomplishments and avoids any critical engagement with the many critiques activists local to Harris’ district have of her.
Now that Kamala IS brat, her depressing “do not come” speech to Guatemalan migrants, a good number fleeing violence, abject poverty, and the lingering effects of the pandemic has been remixed the world over in various TikToks, along with her mother’s anecdote about falling out of a coconut tree and laughing at Venn diagrams, and being unburdened by what has been. As Amanda Hess writes in the New York Times:
The measure of a candidate’s charisma used to be, “Would you have a beer with her?” Now it’s more like, “Are you willing to spend your evening editing a fancam-style video that sets her idiosyncrasies to pop music so effectively that they produce a pleasant narcotic effect?”
After eight months of staring at a genocide through my phone, watching college aged kids getting the shit beat out of them by the government for protesting, flailing around, trying to find my own ways to help, watching the chronic crumble of infrastructure and basic human rights and the lunatics who have the power to make it so, I am tired and I feel defeated. If I’m being radically honest with you all right now, the Kamala memes boost my mood. It’s amusing to watch TikToks of 365 coconut tree remixes or finishing a side project at work and saying, “we did it, Joe.”
But that doesn’t mean I don’t also have the space in my brain to think about how Kamala’s track record on social justice – not the misconceptions, the real shit – don’t feel great. Or how, as Olurin stated in her video, there are myriad factors that might stop liberal non-black people for voting for her, or the fact that misogynoir may stop black men from voting for her. One could also consider how black men vote conservative at higher rates than black women, or how real conservative black women are being propped up by republican media in their bid to play identity politics.
When Walden says they’re going to grant Foster grace, when they say
everything that you said in your video was drenched in internalized misogyny. I don't know what childhood trauma you got but don't project that shit on Kamala; and it could be easy for me to beat you down but instead I'm going to lift you up and tell you that you're enough…I'm sure you've heard it yourself, but you have to stop projecting all your no’s and every person who stood in the way or questioned your ability to lead, your ability to do your job, questioned your credentials, you need to stop doing that shit to Kamala because it's all internalized anti blackness and misogyny.
Walden is right in a way; black women of all kinds know misogyny and misogynoir intimately. They have had doors shut in their faces and they have had men, both in and out of their community talk down to them, yell at them, treat them with indignity, and attempt to embarrass them in public to progress their own careers and gain internet clout.
Black women are showing up in droves for Kamala, but there are some who are skeptical that she can win. I’ve spoken to the women in my family — Gen X and older — who have the same qualms; they hope she wins, they’re rooting for her, but their memory is long, they know how black women are treated in America. Foster herself has indicated that she is putting in an enthusiastic vote for Harris, even if she does have some criticisms of the choices she’s made in her career. And as Olurin has said before, “choosing a president is about choosing your weakest adversary. The government doesn’t create change, people do.”
I wonder if Angela Davis, a lifelong activist, avid abolitionist, and black icon had made the same criticisms of Kamala Harris as other highly educated black women who have been doing the work and the reading, would so many people (but maybe liberal black men especially) be so quick to tell her to shut the fuck up and fall in line with the party.
When Beyoncé plays a clip of Malcolm X preaching that “The most disrespected person in America, is the black woman. The most un-protected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America, is the black woman.” We all nod our heads and agree, many without truly considering what that means. When “listen to Black women” became a common phrase in 2020, we all clap and agree to do better, whatever that means and for whatever it’s worth. But when Black women reflect on their experiences, the experiences of those in their community, when they consider the way black women have been treated on a national and international scale and make educated guesses about one of their own? Well, that’s internalized misogynoir.
If you’re critically thinking about how you’re going to vote this November, don’t allow anyone to shout you into submission. The first election I can remember where the campaigns were telling voters there was a lot at stake was Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. Every four years since then, it feels like there is more and more at stake, namely your basic civil and human rights. If you don’t vote in the exact way that people are asking you to, then you are against freedom and democracy. Even if you do vote the “right way” but have some questions or maybe challenge an idea or two, you only exist to spite your community, you hate women and people of color.
They assure you that one day in the not so far off future that we will be free from the constraints of “the lesser of two evils.” But somehow, it only gets worse and worse and worse. To me, the message boils down to “don’t listen to activists and community organizers, don’t vote with what resonates most with your own moral values, fuck the core ideas of democracy, just listen to us, because if you don’t you’re a self-hating dumb bitch. And I’m praying for you, sis.”
Especially when she received substantial support from the Black Congressional Caucus and ran a campaign that highlighted racial injustice at a time when the #8Can’tWait campaign was in full force.
the phrase is “in the bud” but okay!