It took only a couple of days after Joe Biden announced he was out of the race for Vice President Kamala Harris to coalesce enough support from the delegates to secure the Democratic nomination for president.
In that time, Republicans have stepped up their attacks on Harris, and many of those attacks have leaned heavily on well-worn racist and sexist tropes.
Ange-Marie Hancock is executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University and curator of the Kamala Harris Project, a group of scholars from across the country studying the vice president.
WOSU spoke to Hancock about what should we make of such rhetoric, and will it make any difference in this unprecedented election.
Matthew Rand: We’ve seen renewed “birther” arguments that falsely claim Harris is ineligible to be president because her parents were not born in the U.S. There was a recent New York Post op-ed saying Harris could soon be “the country’s first DEI president.” And there’s been a slew of graphic, frequently sexualized memes demeaning the vice president shared online. What do you make of this kind of rhetoric, and is it anything new?
Ange-Marie Hancock: Well, the first part of the answer is no. It is nothing new, sadly and unfortunately. We certainly know that from the perspective of race. We saw some of this with regard to when Barack Obama was running for president and then thereafter.
And we did see it with regard to race and gender together with how Michelle Obama was portrayed, even though she was not a candidate for office, during either of those races.
And so, these stereotypes and tropes that have come up are part of a very long history of how Black women and Asian-American women have actually been portrayed, because we have to remember that Kamala Harris is both half black as well as half Indian, so Asian American, and those two sets of stereotypes are actually coming together in what we're seeing around Kamala Harris.
So, the sexualization and the fetishization part is something that has been a stereotype common to both African American women as well as Asian American women, in terms of being either exotic on the Asian American side, or being sexually wanton, for lack of a better word, on the African American side.
So, those kinds of things have a long history in the United States. And so too do the birther arguments, sadly, particularly for Asian Americans. There's something called the perpetual foreigner syndrome, which is the idea that, again, the question is not “Where are you from?” And you say, “I was born in Oakland, California,” which is something that Harris might say. It's instead, “No, where are you really from? You can't possibly be from the United States.” And there are a lot of folks who have written about that and documented that for over a century.
Matthew Rand: Obviously, this is going to resonate with the trolls and many in the MAGA crowd. But does this resonate with your typical voter who might not be as aware of what's going on?
Ange-Marie Hancock: It's not so much designed to convince voters who would believe those stereotypes in the first place. It's really around how you convince independents not to believe those kinds of things, because there's a lot of research suggesting that voters respond to it, even if consciously they don't think they're responding to it.
They're actually integrating that into their image of her. The voters that are committed to her, the voters that were already leaning towards her, probably not a lot of impact. But those voters who just don't know right about whether or not she would make a good president, those are the ones who could be swayed, even against their best intentions.
Matthew Rand: Finally, how can we all, as citizens, work to improve the dialog in our political discourse and be better neighbors?
Ange-Marie Hancock: It sounds very corny, but I really do think it is very important for us, even as we disagree, to understand that disagreement is at the heart of what it means to live in a democracy. So, we need to manage our expectations. And then also, really try and understand the other side. The idea must be that we want to ensure our democracy allows us to safely disagree about policy.
