The New Yorker Radio Hour - Kamala Harris, Race, and the Presidency; Plus, Louisa Thomas on the Paris Olympics

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

One of the big questions about Vice-President Harris’s candidacy is undoubtedly race. She would not be the first Black President. “I think that most times when people bring Kamala Harris and Barack Obama into the same conversation, they are kind of mistaken—it’s just this kind of wish-casting,” Vinson Cunningham says. But “what they do have in common is a Black father who is not from America. And this brings all kinds of strange things into being . . . in creating a Black American identity.” Cunningham and fellow staff writer Doreen St. Félix discuss Harris’s complicated identity as the child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, and more.  (This segment is an excerpt from a longer conversation on The Political Scene.) Plus, the New Yorker sports correspondent Louisa Thomas talks with David Remnick about some of the unusual venues of the Paris Olympics—from the Place de la Concorde and the supposedly cleaned-up Seine to a small reef village in Tahiti. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I think it's fair to say there are no safe predictions to make in this election. That is very clear. But we're talking on the program today about Kamala Harris, who we've got to presume, at least for the moment, is the Democratic nominee. Two of our staff writers got together to talk about Harris's candidacy, and in particular, the question of race. Sixteen years after Barack Obama won the presidency,

does race still matter, or better put, how does it matter in a presidential election? Vincent Cunningham and Doreen Sanfileaks are both critics at the New Yorker. Vincent also wrote the book, Great Expectations, a novel based on his experience, working for the Obama campaign.

They spoke with Tyler Foggett, an editor at the New Yorker, and one of the hosts of our podcasts, The Political Scene. Well, you know, I think that most times when people bring Kamala Harris and Barack Obama into the same conversation, they are kind of mistaken, right? That is just this kind of wishcasting. But what they do have in common is a black father who is not from America. And this brings all kinds of strange things into being.

And they both in creating a black American identity, right, and trying to curate, like to, to, to, to, you know, to. to sort of, and I shouldn't say trying to. I don't know what the sort of level of intention was, but the same way that Barack Obama sort of goes to Chicago, joins Trinity Church, sits under the preaching and the tutelage of Jeremiah Wright. You can think of the parallel motion in Kamala Harris' life is like going to an HBCU,

joining perhaps the most famous historically black sorority, the A.K.A.A.s. Tying themselves to a more distinctly American form of blackness than the one that is signified. by their fathers. And that to me is really interesting because black identity, black American identity is always like constructed

even by those of us who like sort of have more traditionally black American family histories, right? It's always a function, at least in part, of choices that are made not simply by heredity

or genetics or whatever, more pernicious ways that you can figure somebody's identity. And politics also, like blackness, is the process of identity creation, right? And so to the extent that that writing oneself into a specifically American form of blackness and also writing oneself into public consciousness as a politician must,

those two things going in concert, that parallel motion is what I'm interested in about both of those figures. And I wonder, I really do wonder, Kamala has been very good about this. You know, you can see, again, videos of her kind of like, it sounds like a college marching band and she's like marching in the middle of the street. It's like a very, like, culturally recognizable thing that she's doing. She's been pretty good at managing these symbols. So I do wonder how she's going to continue to do that over the course of the next hundred or so days. That's really interesting, incredibly interesting and astute. And it makes me think about the, in some ways, like, ignored trip that Harris had made to the continent of Africa, which is how it was framed as

almost like a kind of ancestral going home journey. That was in March of 2023. So Harris went for a nine-day trip. She, you know, started off in Ghana and then ended up in Tanzania and Zambia. And it was described as, you know, some people as a kind of like charm offensive. And the first time that a vice president was demonstrating, you know, a kind of like modernized interest in what was happening in the continent, you know, in the context of increased Chinese investment within many African countries. Harris was potentially taking on an issue that like no one else cared about and could have like honed a more acute vision of her identity through it. And yet the profile in the Atlantic expresses a kind of disappointment or frustration with her performance during this trip

because she didn't actually convey the going back to the motherland excitement that people were expecting. And what I find really interesting about the trip to Africa, about her relationship to American blackness, is also what is on said is her relationship to her South Indianness. Obviously, right now, Modi is the leader of India. We don't seem to think of asking Harris about her relationship. to that fascism happening on the other side of the world. And it speaks to this idea that I'm trying to work through. And I think many of us are trying to work through is like the slipperiness of what it is to be an Asian American and how that idea is manufactured within our ideas

of American exceptionalism. And I wonder when that part of her identity, which she gets from the mother, right? That's the matriarchal condition that Harris so much crazy. in her memoir and in her personal anecdotes, when will it come to the fore in political conversation? There was so much talk this week about the Zoom call that 44,000 black women attended, and then there was a Zoom call for black men, but Kamala Harris is also an Indian woman.

And I find the lack of engagement with that reality to be, there's just like a, I think, a level of, like, delusion. there. It seems like part of the reason why we focus on Harris's blackness and less so on the fact that she is also South Asian is that people are just really excited about the idea of having a female Barack Obama. Vincent, you worked on Obama's campaign. Do you think that this is an accurate comparison or is it kind of a reductive one? I mean, is there a more expansive way that we should be thinking about her identity? Yeah, at least as a campaigner and as a sort of carrier of the sort of mood of the moment or responds to a zeitgeist.

What Harris lacks, in terms of like sort of coding herself along a political spectrum, is the one issue that makes you seem more progressive than you are. Like Barack Obama had, I was against the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton, you were not, was such a big and powerful code for I am to the left of you. Back in the days, those terms were, you know, as Democrats, you were either wine track or beer track, right? And it made him the wine track candidate of Ivy League professors or whatever, you know, something like that. It coded him in a way that was very strong. Does it matter, though, since she's not going through a primary?

That's, I think that is what is really, you know, because to your point, she was, the Medicare for all thing was a way for her to sort of tack closer to Bernie and Elizabeth Warren, but not all the way. but to the left, again, in a coded way of the likes of Klobuchar, Biden, Buttigieg, etc., trying to be in the middle of that crowd. Now she doesn't have to do that. That's a great point. For me, I've always thought about her more in terms of like California, thinking about her in concert with like people like her political mentor, among other things, Willie Brown, like the machine politics of California. We'll talk more about Brown later. Absolutely. Or like over and against Gavin Newsom, her sort of career long.

friend of me or whatever. Like, that to me has been a really interesting aspect of her political character, which is not necessarily ideological, but comes down to tactics, like, you know, being on the horn or whatever. Well, if Harris does become, like, a single-issue candidate, it's going to be on the Dobbs decision. And she's kind of, like, perfectly slaughtered

into an advocacy of the reinstitution of reproductive rights using what is essentially to mean language that even verges on the conservative. Harris had a appearance, I think it was in Michigan, where she spoke with two conservative women, Republicans, one of whom had been someone who had worked in the Trump administration. And the way that she talked about abortion

was very different from the way that Harris had talked about abortion in the past. She very much couched it, of course, and this idea that a woman who decides to terminate a pregnancy or to seek this care is doing so under the advisement or counsel of her rabbi, her imam, or her priest. I think she understands that to stay in the center right now is, like, her best set. It's believed that she was the first sitting vice president or president to visit an abortion clinic. You know, when I read that, I remember wondering, you know, was abortion one of her deeper, commitments, or does it seem like this is an issue that she has kind of taken the lead on because

Biden, who was Catholic, is kind of uncomfortable with it? So it's quite interesting. There's a story in her memoir that she has been resurfacing as of late. When Harris was in high school, I believe, in Oakland, she had a friend who came to her and told her that she was being molested by her stepfather, I believe, and Harris incensed for her friend, went to her mother. And she was, and told her the story and said, my friend needs to move in with us. And her mother agreed, and the friend did live with her for a time. And she's been telling this story, which as far as origin, you know, myths or stories go, is quite gruesome to listen to. It shows to me, it's a way of like recontextualizing the abortion rights issue again within a emotive space

that she can exploit because she is a woman. I think that we're definitely not in this Clintonian era where the gender has to be both lampooned, but also diminished in order to be in the boys club. Harris is not playing that game at all, which is why the Republican retorts calling her like a crazy cat lady or whatever or not actually really working,

because she's not dependent on framing herself as a politician who believes in abortion rights because she is a woman. It's so much more about this, like, moral space. Doreen San Felix with Vincent Cunningham. They're both staff writers for The New Yorker, and they spoke with editor Tyler Foggett, and you can hear a longer version of that conversation on the political scene, a podcast from The New Yorker.

There's more coming up on The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm joined by Louisa Thomas, who writes our column, the sporting scene. Louisa, I am so glad, so relieved to be talking to you. We've been talking about nothing but politics for so long.

Yes, we'll be talking about the Olympics in which politics have never been involved. The despair of it. The Summer Olympics, however, are here. They're starting in Paris this week, but not every event will be held in a stadium or a sports complex. And you've got three unexpected venues. where different events will be held. What's the first? The first is a river as it happens.

The Sen. And in fact, this is the site not only of a couple of events, including the Marathon Swim and the Triathlon, but also the opening ceremonies. It's a three-mile course down the river. Athletes will be traveling on barges as part of the Olympic parade. They'll pass the Louvre, the Notre Dame. the Notre Dame, you know, what could go wrong?

Such showoffs. They actually had this idea after like the 2018 youth games. There was a festival like in the streets for this youth games opening ceremony. And they thought, well, why don't we do that? They'd actually really tried to reimagine the Olympics because the Olympics had become so overwhelmingly expensive. And Paris decided that it was going to do something quote-unquote sustainable. It is still incredibly expensive. It's like the sixth most expensive Olympics ever and it costs billions of dollars.

But a lot of the stadiums that they're building are temporary in an effort to cut down costs. And they're just really trying to kind of be creative about it. And they thought, you know, a better way to showcase the city than a romantic cruise down the sun. Well, wait a minute. You're telling me that swimming events are going to be in the sand or the marathon swim is going to be in the sand and the triathlon. I've been around the scent. I'm not sure I'd want to dive into that water. What you're saying is it's actually really a sewer.

Is that what you're saying? It's absolutely, you are absolutely correct, actually. It has been illegal to swim in the sun for a century because it is a cesspool. But they have spent $1.5 billion on treatment plan renovations and also building a giant holding tank near the Australis train station. It's the size of 20 Olympic swimming pools. And the idea is that the real problem with the sun is actually not people like dumping their their crap into the sun, although there's a lot of that. The real problem is that when it rains, this antiquated sewer system overflows, and this untreated sewage mixed in the pipes just

flows right into the river. So they have tried... I know when I'm diving in a river, and I'm going to be in there for a while for a triathlon or a marathon swim, the phrase that I want to be having resonate in my mind is untreated sewer. Well, let me say, first of all, open water swimmers have swim in some pretty gnarly circumstances. Like, this will not be their first time that they've swum in, like, less than pristine waters. However, yeah, this is bad. Levels of bacteria routinely top what is considered safe for swimming. And even after this tremendous effort, in the case of storms, really big rains will still overflow it. And in several readings in June. Let's just say it's a good thing I didn't qualify this time around. Yeah, the mayor of Paris

actually promised that she would swim in the sun is like a kind of getting. guarantee of how clean it was. And they kept pushing back the date. Finally, last week, she jumped in very briefly. She said it was wonderful, a little bit cold. She did. Right. Yeah. She's still alive. She's still alive. Um, the president, Macron has said that he will do it, but not before the Olympics. He's good Olympics. He's in all the swimmers be the guinea pigs. Um, if things get really bad, they will cancel the swimming portion, or one option is to cancel a swimming portion of the triathlon and make it a duathlon and to move the, um, he's going to move the, um, the swimvers be the guinea marathon swim to like where the kayakers and canoers do their thing. But the hope is that they will

be able to swim. And that once the Olympics leave next summer, they're going to have like swimming pools in the sun where hot Parisians are going to be able to to cool off among the, well, I'm not going to see. Hot Parisians cooling off. You got the headline now. Now venue number two, as the cool venue of this year's Olympics is? The number two cool event is the Plostela Concorde, the kind of famous place where people get their head chopped off during the French Revolution. But instead of decapitations, we're going to see what? So this is kind of like the youth games. This is like the Olympics has been making this tremendous effort in the past few decades

to try and attract young eyeballs, or rather, you know, probably television under immense pressure as ratings continue to decline to reach eight and expand of viewership. and they are doing that with like sports like three on three basketball, skateboarding, and then the only new event at this Paris Olympics, which is breaking, which is, you know, grows out of hip hop in the 1970s in the Bronx. And it's basically these, they're called B-boys and B-girls are going to square off and have a little kind of competition. The DJ picks the music. They have to respond to it.

There are judges. They all have names like the U.S. is represented by B-Boy Victor, who is actually the world champion. And other prominent breakers are Shigget kicks. B-boy, Phil Wizard, B-boy, Danny Dan, B-Girl, Emmy. I think this is going to be actually huge. There's a lot of interest in breaking. Are there any countries that are particularly good at breakdancing as a sport? Well, the United States of America is where this is born.

Yes, yes. So, B-Boy Victor. Indeed, we dominate. Yeah. So, yeah, and actually B-girl Sunny, she's a former exec, I think. I don't want to say she's an exact. but she's a poor high-ranking person Estee Latter. She quit her job to focus on breaking.

But I think Japan is quite good. There's a pretty big breaking scene in Europe as well. We're calling it breaking now and not breakdancing. Apparently, breakdancing is actually somewhat pejorative. I actually cannot tell you why, but they don't like it to be called break dancing. And breaking... Oh, and I never said it. Yeah, breaking refers to the breaks and the music is something I did not.

I sort of thought it was like your body will break when you assume these positions. as you dive onto like hard floors, but it's actually like the breaks and the music for the beats. I think it could be both. What other venue sticks out, break it up, break it up, break it up? What other venue sticks out at the Paris Olympics? So we're going to travel very, very far, thousands of miles to French Polynesia to Chao and Tahiti,

which is the site of an iconic break, which is where the surfing is going to be taking place, which is one of these other events that has been attracted, added to attract the cool kids. So we have surfing, and Bill Finnegan, our great surfing correspondent, will definitely approve. Well, it's somewhat controversial, I've got to say. The Olympics, like, this is a village, apparently has, like, a snack bar, like, that's the restaurant. And this is kind of a hidden, you know, gem.

And now the world is going to be descending on this, like, tiny fishing village that some of people are, you might imagine, somewhat concerned about what it's going to do to the small, They're saying all this, the structures will be temporary, except for this three-story aluminum tower, which is drilled into the coral, which is very fragile. That can't be good. Yeah, no, can't be good, can't be good. Now, a little tender question. How have people reacted to this venue being used

given the kind of stark reminder of French colonialism? You know, this is actually kind of, I was sort of looking for more of an outcry than I've found. I mean, this is considered one of the serving's iconic sites, So I think there wasn't a lot of surprise when they chose, and there's a lot of pride over this. But yeah, I mean, colonialism is, I mean, it's a reminder of, frankly, like the Olympics, you know, checkered history itself. You know, this is a kind of a, you know, a 19th century antiquated project. I think most of the concern has been less kind of anti-colonial and more of it has been environmental

and also kind of threat to the way of life. That's where a lot of the focus of the protest has been, not so much like, why is France, you know, presuming to, to, you know, quote, quote, own this, you know, place thousands of miles away. But why are they going to sort of degrade this very special, fragile place? Because, you know, they're going to have a, like, a competition. Right. Against that stark political background. What surfers should we look out for when we tune into the surfing competition? Some of the favorites in the event are John John Florence from the U.S. and Gabe Medita on the men's side, a Brazilian. On the women's side, we have actually a local favorite,

known as the Queen of Chapo, Vaheen Fierro. She's 24 years old. She's goofy-footed. Bill Fennegan can tell you what that means. It means that she leads with her right foot, which is particularly important on this wave because it creates such a terrifying, huge barrel. It helps her get a lot of speed facing the wave instead of having her back to it. Our long time listeners will know that I went surfing on the radio. On the radio. We went Phil Finnegan. You mean you went surfing on the radio waves as we are now?

No, I got into, but let me just say the most difficult physical aspect of the kind of surfing I did was getting into the wetsuit, about which I will not go on about. And it was a semi-catastrophe. I don't know. Why am I not surprised? Louisa, what are you actually looking forward to seeing in the Olympics? What's the big sport for you? I mean, I always love the, I'm kind of like a normal person. I like the gymnastics. I like the swimming. I want to see Katie Ledecki swim like seven laps ahead of everyone else with a, you know, with a cup of chocolate milk. I'd balance the top of her head. But I will also, let's not forget track and field, which is, you know, basically the, I will cry at least once when someone does something amazing because I am moved by the Olympic spirit and, you know, really fast, charismatic people.

Louisa Thomas, thanks so much. Thank you. Louisa Thomas is writing about the Olympic Games at New Yorker.com, and you can be sure I'll be following the basketball, especially, men's and women's very, very closely. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios. and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of tune yards,

with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, Ursula Summer, and Alicia Zuckerman, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parrish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccan. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. Thank you.