This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is co-published by Rolling Stone with permission.
Objectively, it is an amazing progression of Black history in a short window of time. In 2008, Barack Obama, a Democrat, was elected as the nation’s first Black president. Sixteen years later, Kamala Harris is poised to become the first Black woman chosen by the party to be its candidate for president.
But much has changed in 16 years. The historic significance of Obama’s candidacy was hope, the symbolism of a Black man in the White House inspiring enough to move millions and urge us to think differently about ourselves. Kamala Harris’ ascension is no such symbol. She is becoming the candidate by dint of being vice president, handed the baton by an aging white president who was more or less forced to step aside as the presumptive nominee because there was too much concern about his own ability to get the job done. Harris’ color is not nearly as important as her ability to do that job — not just take Biden’s place on the ticket but take the Democrats across the finish line in order to salvage, in the view of many, the desperate, dwindling hope that the whole nation will right itself in the storm of right-wing recklessness. That brazen plan, iterated in detail in Project 2025, continues to lash at the pillars barely holding the democratic project together.
That’s a much bigger task than Obama had. He, after all, set for himself only the task of winning. During his candidacy the country also faced a crisis, the housing meltdown that led to the Great Recession. Certainly that shifted the election in Obama’s favor, but the hope that was at the core of his campaign didn’t lose its power; when he won, the joy and sense of optimism that erupted around the country was real.
What a presumed Harris campaign is facing is an existential crisis that does not motivate but paralyzes. It proceeds not from joy or hope but an anxiety about whether and how people of good will, not just Democrats, can really be in charge again. There’s growing cynicism that GOP tricks, from coordinated voter suppression laws to a stacked Supreme Court that carves out criminal immunity for Trump, will just keep coming, regardless of the vote. Elections simply won’t matter.
Which is why Kamala Harris as a candidate feels matched to this moment. She wants to fight. Trump has made fighting central to his campaign, especially after the assassination attempt, though the tone of MAGA has always been belligerent, in-your-face, sneeringly dismissive of “wokeism” and of its root idea, hope. Harris, a former prosecutor, is already in battle mode, declaring at her first rally that she knows Trump’s type, and is ready for it. She’s offering what the Democrats have badly needed, a belligerence to match, or at least to counter, MAGA’s. They need not an avatar of hope but an avatar of give-’em-hell.
Harris seems to relish the prospect. All of the past missteps and awkwardness and public struggles to convey a core ideology, as a VP and before that in her own failed 2020 presidential campaign effort, may be forgiven if she leads with a sense of obligation to punch back. That it would be a Black woman punching back will be that much more satisfying, especially since Trump over the years has been demonstrably racist — calling out the far-right Proud Boys, lauding Nazis in Charlottesville as “very fine people,” claiming Mexico is sending rapists across the border. He has repeatedly shown contempt for Black women who have dared to criticize or hold him accountable — Fani Willis, Judge Tanya Chutkan, election workers in Georgia, Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Harris would have a platform like no other. As a presidential candidate she would be on equal footing with Trump, as his Democratic counterpart. And as a Black woman she would ably carry the legitimate anger of so many other Americans, from women of all colors to gay and trans people to poor people to immigrants, all of whom find themselves caught in the MAGA crosshairs.
For all the grimness and high stakes of the moment, there is some individual magic. Harris had a golden career in California, rising from D.A. of San Francisco to state attorney general to U.S. senator with relative ease. She branded herself as a progressive, and while critics have taken issue with that, especially around her career as a prosecutor, she is, at the very least, a solid Democrat. The failed 2020 presidential primary campaign stalled her ambition only briefly; Biden chose her as his running mate, the first Black and South Asian woman to be on the presidential ticket. Having broken that barrier four years ago, she is set to break another and realize a dream she likely never thought would happen quite like this. That drama of it all does excite certain segments of the party, primarily Black women, a key Democratic constituency that must turn out in order for the party to have any chance at winning in November.
A catalyst of the record groundswell of financial support around Harris that’s still building was the already legendary “Black woman phone call” that happened immediately following Biden’s announcement, when thousands of Black women participated in a Zoom call hosted by the organization Win With Black Women. It raised $1.5 million in three hours. That’s good political strategizing, but it’s also inspiration and racial pride that harks back to Obama’s first campaign. A lawyer friend of mine who was on that call described the gathering, which grew to include thousands more women than it had anticipated, as “truly something to behold.”
I have no doubt it was. But never forget that Harris is being so rapidly embraced not so much for who and what she is, but for who and what she is not: Trump, and on the opposite side and for different reasons, Biden. She is the likely Democratic nominee who, for those alarmed by the prospect of another MAGA administration, will become a lifeline, and if being of color makes her a better lifeline, that’s a plus. But of course we don’t know if it will be or not; what hasn’t changed but only gotten uglier over the last 16 years is the fact that race divides. There’s a lot of storm ahead of us we all will have to weather.
From Rolling Stone US
