She is not Geraldine Ferraro. She is not Winona LaDuke. She is most certainly not Sarah Palin! She is sharp, eloquent, confident, charismatic and flexible and is a woman of colour! Exactly 100 years after the landmark 19th Amendment to the US Constitution triumphantly proclaimed that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the US or by any State on account of sex”, California Senator Kamala Harris, has become the first woman of colour to be selected as the running mate of a presidential candidate. Vandalised by brutal majoritarian identity-politics that verges on crass totalitarianism, the seething US democracy needs someone like Senator Harris to initiate a process of socio-racial reconciliation and compromise.
Chosen by Biden through a discreet search team, Senator Harris had to compete with three other formidable women: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Susan E Rice, the former national security adviser. Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Representative Karen Bass of California were also considered. Harris is exceptionally good at blazing a trail: she is the first woman, first African-American and first Asian attorney general of California. Her personal history is remarkably multi-faceted. She is proudly biracial — her father was a Jamaican and her mother Indian. However, she was raised as an African-American and opted to attend Howard University, Washington, which is part of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) conglomerate. The institutions comprising HBCU were established before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to educate the African-American community. Unsurprisingly, she is considered a dyed-in-the-wool African-American politician. This means that the next vice-president might be a South Asian, Caribbeanese, African-American woman whose Americanness is as vivid as it gets.
The multiculturalism that is an intrinsic part of Harris’ personality also tends to reinforce Biden’s political persona. He is being projected as a leader who can trounce Trumpism: an acerbic model of governance that has bred discrimination, divisiveness and racial prejudice. Reeling from four years of disruptive politics, the socio-political milieu in the US needs the healing skills of someone like Biden, who is trying to construct multiracial and cross-generational alliances to nullify the effects of sheer political bedlam. He is simultaneously battling the invidious right wing Republican agenda that enabled Trump to turn the White House into another Trump Tower. Senator Harris can help Biden succeed in these endeavours.
Her selection is a striking response to Trump’s unswerving efforts to denigrate people of colour and immigrants. These people have no place in his “Great America”, which is a delusionary reincarnation of a pre-civil war white agrarian state wherein the malevolent master-slave relationship is not only institutionalised but also celebrated. In this hierarchical relationship, the white man is the master and Blacks and people of colour are the slaves. They are subservient to both society and state. Insidiously, women do not have any significant role to play in that unreal America. Alas, in a world which has metamorphosed into a moral entity much bigger than this hallucination, Trump’s rebarbative black and white dichotomy has become redundant. Harris personifies that redundancy.
In contradistinction to Trump’s illusory “Great America”, Biden can rebuild the good old America, which was characterised by inclusivity and which frowned upon discrimination based on race, gender and class. He can reconfigure American society and nudge women, people of colour and others opposed to Trumpism to the political centre stage. A resilient fighter herself, Harris could be a force multiplier in this effort.
If Trump’s electoral win four years ago was a black swan event for US politics, the rise of Kamala Harris might turn out to be a definitive interpretation of the proverbial American dream!
Published in The Express Tribune, September 4th, 2020.
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