A few weeks before Biden announced he was leaving the presidential race, a journalist called me to talk about the “DEI” attacks on Vice President Harris. I’m guessing he wasn’t expecting my answer, which is that we have to go back to an iconic, record-scratch moment from nearly twenty years ago. On a telethon to raise money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, rap artist Kanye West (as he was known at the time) remarked, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” His co-host, Mike Myers, stared in stunned silence. The camera cut away. In the following days, the president expressed hurt at being called a racist, and West backed away from his statement.
This was a relatively small moment in the bumpy ride that was the Bush presidency (or, for that matter, West’s career). But I keep coming back to it because it so perfectly encapsulates race and the American presidency for the period between Reagan and Obama. During that period, race continued to play a central role in American political life. For those who bothered to look, Hurricane Katrina revealed the impact of long legacies of racism and even slavery, intertwined with class and poverty. The widely condemned administration response drew attention to the drawbacks of a political philosophy that downplayed the necessity of government assistance, and the way those consequences fell disproportionately on communities of color. Yet when someone pointed this out directly, he ended up apologizing to the most powerful man on earth for hurting his feelings.
This way of speaking about racism reduces it to an interpersonal problem and pushes the structural and historical factors out of the conversation. There’s a deeper contradiction here, too. From 1980 to 2008 or so, we stumbled through nearly three decades of presidential politics in which race still very much motivated political divisions, juxtaposed against a constrained and impoverished vocabulary for talking about it in national politics.
What does all of this have to do with VP Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate? It has to do with her position as a candidate, twenty years and two highly racialized presidencies – Barack Obama and Donald Trump – later. Efforts to paint her as the candidate of “DEI” – alongside efforts by some Republicans to shut their colleagues up, for the love of God – reflect these struggles over raced language, and the partial resolutions brought by the racial politics of the intervening years. How can we understand what’s changed, and what it means now?
Obama’s presidency made it impossible not to talk and think about race in presidential politics. Supporters saw his victory as a sign of racial progress, though they might have disagreed about what that meant. The Tea Party movement, which organized in opposition to Obama, had distinct racial messages at its rallies, even as leaders tried to distance and disavow. By 2016, the various strains of backlash added up to a formidable set of political ideas: that Obama’s presidency had favored Black Americans and immigrants, that he was an illegitimate outsider, that he and his wife were beneficiaries of affirmative action.
The backlash wasn’t enough for Trump to win a popular majority, but it was enough for him to win the White House, combined with other political factors. (If you’d like to read 30,000 more words about race and presidential politics from Reagan through Obama, and then Trump, I have a book coming out with Princeton University Press sometime in 2025). Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign and after, Trump critics accused him and his MAGA surrogates of “saying the quiet part out loud,” referring to a long-standing practice of making “coded” racial references – and asserting that Trump was doing away with the colorblind veneer.
The George Floyd protests of 2020, the racial dynamics of the pandemic, and the emergence of Biden as the “safe, electable” candidate all raised the stakes of race and presidential politics further. It will take a long time to fully grasp the racial politics of this era. But for the president – the person charged, for better or worse, with having the largest platform to define national identity – the race conversation had changed in important ways. Movements for racial justice and for white supremacy were both more visible. The Confederate flag had flown, for the first time, in the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Voices of racial progress and racial backlash were much, much louder than they had been in past decades.
It's in this new environment that the Harris campaign launches, energized and under unusual circumstances. One of the most interesting developments of the last couple of weeks have been these fundraising Zoom calls – themselves a kind of telethon. These really show how much the public conversation about race and identity has changed. These started with a Black Women for Harris, and the call for white women was framed as an effort to “answer the call” – to acknowledge privilege and correct the mistakes of 2016, when, famously, “white women voted for Trump.” There have been a number of other identity-based calls – South Asian women, LGBTQIA+ Americans, young people.
And there’s been some discomfort around that idea. As Koritha Mitchell explains, “Many Americans have been taught that it is generally bad and probably insulting to mention categories of race and sexuality.” The organized calls for white women and Monday’s “white dudes” for Harris raised some eyebrows because, as one speaker at the dudes’ call acknowledged, white people organizing around whiteness hasn’t been a terribly positive development for American democracy. But as Mitchell, a literary historian who specializes in race, gender, and culture, lays out, it doesn’t have to be this way. Acknowledging whiteness challenges the assumption that it’s the “default,” and paves the way for understanding everyone’s experiences. The “white dudes” call (a cultural phenomenon I’ll be picking apart for years) defused the exclusion concern by kicking off with Working Families Party leader Maurice Mitchell, who is Black. (Kimberlé Crenshaw, theorist of the term “intersectionality” also explains the value of these events in this interview.)
It's genuinely difficult to imagine talking about identity this way in mainstream politics – confronting the awkwardness and the contradictions – fifteen years ago. The fact that these calls have been framed around fulfilling civic obligation offers the prospect of something new when we speak about identity and politics, where it might be tied to awareness, positivity, and inclusion. We haven’t arrived there yet. But we can see possibilities for the future of race and presidential politics that aren’t dominated by the tense colorblindness of the past or the vitriol of the Trump era.
For his part, the change and continuity of racial politics are evident in what Trump is doing as well. This week’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists’ conference eliminated any doubt that this will be a long, difficult campaign laden with racist messages. The decision to invite him in the first place drew criticism, including the resignation of one of the convention’s co-chairs. Trump’s remarks were such a disaster that his campaign pulled him off stage early. Most of the media response has focused on his remarks about Harris’s Black and Indian heritage, which were bizarre and abysmal. But his hostile response to the first question struck me as equally bad, and indicative of what social scientists call “old-fashioned racism.” His remarks revisited old themes from 2016 and also revealed his lack of preparation for the changed circumstances of 2024.
Alongside the changing conversation about race and presidential politics, there are some points of continuity. Accusations that Harris is a “DEI candidate” draw on a long history of anti-affirmative action language on the right – one of Pat Buchanan’s attacks against George H.W. Bush in the 1992 primary was that he had signed a “quota” bill.
Another thing that has undoubtedly evolved, but not fundamentally changed, is the complication of gender in presidential politics. This was the contradiction of 2016: much of the campaign discourse among Clinton supporters was about gender, but a good deal of the story of the election ended up being about race. In a post-Dobbs world, gender issues are even more charged, and this has already emerged as a major theme as Harris becomes the presumptive nominee.
The gender narrative seems straightforward for now, while race seems anything but. Her campaign hints at race in various ways, and maybe that’s one of the reversals of the old way of doing racial politics. Instead of stumbling to respond to racially coded language, Democrats evoke race through language, music, and visuals, and Republicans are left struggling to respond. Talking about race in politics is still fraught – but it’s changed. And intersectionality is no longer just for graduate seminars – this campaign will see the development of a public conversation around gender, (multi)racial identity, and probably a heavy dose of class and ideology as well.
In some sense, the best candidates are vessels for ideas – they bring enough ambiguity to allow others to see what they want to see. In the past, I’ve argued that Biden’s long record and political instincts allowed him to fit this mold, but his candidacy and presidency have always been a little too rooted in his identity, selected for caution and reaction to Trump. Harris’s multiple salient identities – South Asian, Black, woman, daughter of immigrants, Californian, prosecutor – allow for many interpretations of who she is and what it means. And in this sense, they allow for her literal identity to be absorbed into an idea. That idea hasn’t come together yet as a full vision for her campaign, a possible presidency, or a new era in presidential politics. But we’re seeing signs that the old one is transforming, and possibly fading away.
"Most of the media response has focused on his remarks about Harris’s Black and Indian heritage, which were bizarre and abysmal." Would be hard for any normal person to disagree that his comments were abysmal. but they are not bizarre in the context of a strategy by Trump to hang on to the black male support polls suggest he has garnered the past few years. The quick support of his appearance from Trumpworld suggests that emphasizing that she is not part of the Generational African American community was not simply Trump being Trump.
Thanks for pointing out the two “journalists” who shook tfg’s hand were from Semafor and Fox. I wondered. At least the audience got what was happening. I discount any article that doesn’t mention the derision he faced when not being so-called questioned by a friendly media source.