Is America ready to elect a Black woman as its president? Vice-President Kamala Harris, who will be officially confirmed as the Democratic US presidential nominee in Chicago next week, is betting that it is.
“In my entire career, I’ve heard people say when I ran… people aren’t ready, it’s not your time, nobody like you has done that before,” the Democrat said in 2019 when she ran against Joe Biden in the primary presidential campaign.
“I haven’t listened and I would suggest that nobody should listen to that kind of conversation.”
But Harris’s campaign never took off and she left the primaries race before Biden picked her as his running mate.
If Harris, 59, manages to beat Donald Trump in November, she will become the first woman and the second Black person, after Barack Obama, to run the world’s leading power.
In so many ways, Harris already is a trailblazer. Born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, she was the first woman attorney general ever elected in California, on top of being the first African American and Asian American to hold that post. She then became the first vice president in US history in those same categories.
In a survey published in September 2023, the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank, found that for a majority of Americans, gender does not play a role in choosing a president.
Sixty per cent of respondents said that a female president would handle pressure as well as a man, while 27 per cent believed that she would do better.
“While female leadership — whether as presidents, queens, prime ministers, and heads of state — has become the norm in many parts of the world, including Europe, Asia, South America, and African nations, the United States has yet to experience this moment,” said Sonia Gipson Rankin, a law professor at the University of New Mexico.
She noted that even though Democrat Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college and therefore the presidency to Trump in 2016, she won the popular vote.
Regina Bateson, a professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder, believes that voters’ biases may not themselves be the issue.
“The problem is often not that voters are actually biased,” Bateson said. “It’s that party insiders and delegates and political donors worry that the voters will be biased.”
That leads them to withhold support from a woman of colour, a phenomenon that Bateson calls “strategic discrimination,” which usually manifests itself during the primaries when a candidate must demonstrate that he or she is able to rally many groups of voters.
Harris, however, took over from Biden after the 81-year-old leader withdrew from the race, thus sparing her “this process of trying to convince people that she’s electable” during the primaries.
Flanked by her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a 60-year-old white man, Harris now hopes to win the trust of all Americans, regardless of ethnicity or gender.
Some are already convinced such as ‘White dudes for Harris’, a group that brought nearly 200,000 people together for a Zoom fundraiser for Harris in late July, raising more than $4 million.
Donald Trump didn’t wait long to attack his Democratic rival on her background.
The billionaire charged that Harris “turned Black” only recently in order to win electoral support.
Harris, who had always spoken of her Black and Asian heritage with pride, called out Trump for his “divisiveness and disrespect”.
The former president’s running mate, J.D. Vance, caused an outcry recently when a 2021 video resurfaced in which he dismisses the Democratic Party as being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives… and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
Harris is married to Douglas Emhoff and helped in raising his two children from a previous marriage. She does not have any biological children of her own.
Vance’s comments caused a backlash amplified by Hollywood stars such as Jennifer Aniston and Glenn Close, and were widely considered a political misstep in a country where the fertility rate is historically low.
Vance has sought to walk back his remarks saying they were taken out of context.