Consider This from NPR - Kamala Harris already faces racism and sexism from Trump and Republicans

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris is barreling towards the Democratic nomination for president.Her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, has a record of personally attacking women of color who stand in his way.Sexist and racist attacks on Harris have already started. How might they impact her bid for office? For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Vice President Kamala Harris is barreling towards the Democratic nomination for president. So we can probably expect more of this from her opponent. I thought she was the meanest, the most horrible, most disrespectful of anybody in the U.S. Senate. That is former President Trump back in 2020 criticizing Harris as Joe Biden's VP pick. Trump has a record of personally attacking Black women in power. He went after New York Attorney General Letitia James and Fannie Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, who brought one of the election interference cases against him. Listen to Trump in 2023. There's a young woman, a young racist in Atlanta,

racist. And they say, I guess they say that she was after a certain gang and she ended up having an affair with the head of the gang or a gang member. And this is a person that wants to indict me. She's got a lot of problems. There's no evidence to support those claims. Meanwhile, Trump also targets children of immigrants like Republican Nikki Haley, who attempted to run for president. Trump had mocked Haley's birth name this year and suggested online that she would be ineligible for the presidency because her parents are immigrants from India. He did the same thing with former President Obama multiple times. I was just informed while on the helicopter that our president has finally released a birth certificate. Now, when it comes to Kamala Harris, Trump has tried a similar tack, amplifying false claims in 2020 about her supposed ineligibility for the office of vice president. They're saying that she doesn't qualify because she wasn't born in this country. 2020 about her supposed ineligibility for the office of vice president. They're saying that she doesn't qualify because she wasn't born in this country.

No, she was born in this country, but her parents... To be clear, Harris was born in Oakland, California. Donald Trump has called undocumented immigrants animals, accused Hillary Clinton of playing the woman's card, and consistently deployed the racially coded insult of angry or nasty to women of color who are in his way. And it's not just Trump who's flinging around this kind of language. Republican members of Congress have already called Harris a DEI hire, as in someone who's benefited from a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative. Like here's Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett,

who suggested that Biden's choice to name Harris his VP four years ago was all about her identity, not about her actual qualifications. Biden said, first off, he said he's going to hire a Black female for vice president. And that not, he just skipped over. What about, what about white females? What about any other group? Just when you go down that route, you take mediocrity. And that's what they have right now as a vice president. Are you suggesting she was a DEI hire? 100 percent. She was a DEI hire.

Well, this week, House Speaker Mike Johnson felt compelled to tell his fellow Republicans to knock it off. This election, as I noted at the outset, is going to be about policies, not personalities. This is not personal with regard to Kamala Harris and her ethnicity or her gender. It had nothing to do with this whatsoever. But all of this rhetoric is out there now. And some voters worry that it will only reinforce the status quo for women of color in politics. Like, here's Lanissa Rozier in Georgia. As a Black woman in America, I just

don't, against Donald Trump, I do not see them letting a Black woman take that seat. Consider this. This is not the first time a woman or a person of color has run for president of the United States. But now the likely Democratic presidential nominee is facing a new wave of sexist and racist personal attacks. How will this impact Harris's bid for president? From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Consider This from NPR. Kamala Harris says she is up to the task of defeating Donald Trump. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump's type.

And in this campaign, I will proudly, I will proudly put my record against his. One person who has studied how rhetoric is used against women in politics is Ange-Marie Hancock, director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. She also happens to lead a group of scholars studying the current vice presidency. Their work is called the Kamala Harris Project. The Kamala Harris Project was founded in literally on January 20th, 2021. So on the day of the inauguration, And its mission is really to bring expert analysis to the understanding of this historic and political moment of having the first woman of color vice president in U.S. history. Hancock told me that she's already seen a racist and sexist backlash against Kamala Harris

in these first days of her presidential campaign? Well, he has certainly started doing things like saying she had two nicknames for her that just came up in the past week. So certainly laughing Kamala Harris and now lying Kamala Harris, those are kind of two. Then there are others that have really focused on, you know, her being liberal and also her kind of attention to the border, because, of course, immigration is a big issue for the Trump campaign more broadly. And so he's really also questioned her competency as well. And that is something we see very common in kind of attacks on female candidates. Well, when you get deeper into conservative circles, does the conversation around Kamala Harris sound worse than what we hear from Donald Trump?

You know, it does in some ways, certainly in some of the far pernicious stereotypes of African-American and Asian-American women. Sometimes very sexualized images, implications, again, around her competence, meaning not her mental competence in terms of the way that it's been talked about, you know, in this particular campaign with President Biden, but her ability to, you know, actually be an effective leader, which is slightly different. And maybe that plays well into his base, but Trump, you know, is not contesting GOP primaries anymore. Is there any evidence that swing voters or independent voters are affected by this kind of language? Are they swayed, turned off? Well, what's interesting about how it impacts swing voters or independent voters is certainly on the surface, if you were to survey independent voters or swing voters, I bet you would get a strong majority who would say, we really don't like that kind of language.

We really don't like, you know, the way in which he talks about, you know, women or talks about his opponents in that kind of way. The challenge, of course, is that many political psychologists have found that even as we kind of consciously say we don't agree with it, it still ends up having a negative impact. And it can particularly have a negative impact when you're talking about the ways in which things are subconsciously kind of lodging in our brain. And so what that means is that for folks who might be kind of leaning Democratic or leaning towards Kamala Harris in this particular context, right, they may not have as strong of an effect. But for those folks, you know, who do have some kind of lingering openness to voting for former President Trump. The idea is that there would be actually a more negative impact there, both because people are filling in the gaps, right,

and saying, you know, well, you know, maybe he's right in some way, shape, or form. So there's a little bit of that kind of implicit work that's going on. But then the other piece of that is also we have implicit biases. And then when people hear things that confirm those implicit biases get reinforced. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And that's what makes it more difficult. Point two is that it's particularly a challenge for someone like a candidate like Kamala Harris, because of course she has so many multiple identities that it makes it difficult for

folks to kind of fit her into a particular box, right? But is that, could that be good and bad? It does. It plays both ways. You're absolutely right. So on the one hand, some researchers have found that there's a strategic advantage, right, to having multiple identities. It makes them kind of able to cross, build bridges and to cross into, you know, populations and communities they may not have traditionally been able to cross into. And what's also happened is that as folks don't quite know what box to put her in, that is what we call kind of a context of uncertainty. And that means that biases are more likely to come out because people don't really know

quite where to put her. And so that's certainly something that candidates in the past, even somebody like former President Obama, had to kind of deal with because he didn't fit neatly into the box that we classify as African American men, for example. Absolutely. Well, when we look back at Barack Obama's campaign for president, or Hillary Clinton's, like, are there strategies from either of those campaigns that Kamala Harris and her team can learn from and use to push back against this kind of rhetoric? Well, I think one thing that certainly the Harris campaign can think about is whether or not there needs to be an additional speech beyond kind of the traditional speech that

happens at the convention where the candidate really has an opportunity to introduce themselves, right? So she would need to do that multiple times. And certainly that's part of what was going on in Wisconsin this week. I think another strategy that could be used is really think about surrogates. And this was something that the Obama campaign was quite successful at doing. Having enough, frankly, white surrogates talk about the issue of race, talk about the ways in which they knew it was going to come up and it needed to be addressed before it actually became an issue.

But those, again, would need to be surrogates who don't necessarily look like her. They need to be surrogates who actually are able to call the question without being kind of shrouded in the you're playing the race card or you're playing the gender card politics. Well, when you hear the concern out there that maybe not enough people in this country can bring themselves to vote for a woman of color, or that this country just isn't ready for a president who's a woman of color, what's your personal reaction to that? When I separate my personal reaction from my scholarly reaction because you're right, there are two. So my scholarly reaction is actually there is a fair amount of research that says should someone actually get into office first, then they are actually much more likely to be elected, reelected, and the country will be ready for them. So in other words, it's much harder to kind of survive the election scrum for women and women of color candidates

than it is to kind of have smooth sailing once they're in office. very much, I think that this country can and should think about whether or not they want to consider the alternative, right? I think, you know, there's always the question of whether or not this country is ready. And then there's also elections are about choices and elections are about who is on the other side and who's the alternative. And I think, you know, certainly with some of the things that have gone on in the past decade, the country might be ready for a complete pivot if they are truly not happy with the way in which the country has been going. And that pivot would be to having a truly historic candidate. That was Ange-Marie Hancock from The Ohio State University and the Scholars Collective

known as the Kamala Harris Project. This episode was produced by Brianna Scott. It was edited by Patrick Jaron Watanon and our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. And one more thing before we go, you can now enjoy the Consider This newsletter. We still help you break down a major story of the day, but you'll also get to know our producers and hosts and some moments of joy from the All Things Considered team. You can sign up at npr.org slash consider this newsletter. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.