Since the announcement of President Joe Biden’s endorsement, Vice President Kamala Harris has gained incredible momentum from young voters in particular. She has also received tremendous pushback from conservatives, Republicans and MAGA supporters. What are we to make of their attempts to discredit her as a viable candidate?
Back when I was in school in the nineties, one of the worst things to be was a poser. To be a poser is to be a fake. A poser acts to impress others. They pretend to belong somewhere they do not.
Although the power of white men has become normalized, white men’s place at the “top” socially, economically, politically, etc., while impressive, lacks integrity. While white men are valid, sovereign beings deserving of functioning in government and leadership positions, the wrongful posturing, the illegitimacy, is the idea that they can hold these positions in excess and at the expense of all other demographic categories and that this social sorting is honest. It is not. White men did not acquire this exaggeration of powers, this dominance, because they are better.
White men are not better. They do not naturally have more merit, more excellence, nor more intelligence, though the wide reaching arms and consequences of white supremacy and patriarchy have made it seem that way. The U.S. government, made up of mostly white men, has long mediated between the interests of white men and the interests of women and people of color. The entire point of DEI and the affirmative action that came before it, is to right these wrongs, to build a society that reorganizes itself along the principle that we are all equal.
Referring to DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, as if it is a bad thing, involves disregarding the entire history of this nation. White supremacy and Patriarchy, not DEI, are the bad things. These systems of exclusion lack authenticity. The diversity that is inherent, the equity that is our right and the inclusion that allow us to be sustainable have integrity. When vast swaths of the population have been locked out of top positions in our social, political and economic systems since as long as we can remember, there will be push back. Those in power have tried to bury justice, but as most of us know, justice buried becomes a seed. When those with power attempt to diminish the validity of a woman of color because she is coming for a “male job,” they are on the wrong side of history. They seek that which is oppressive, fake and they are posing. That line of white male amok has encouraged a second Donald Trump Presidency, as if one go wasn’t enough for a convict and sex offender who gutted the federal government. We are a bit tired of that type of weirdness.
Would Presidential candidate Kamala Harris have so much momentum if she were white and male? I’m not sure. The truth is that it is about time. White men occupy approximately sixty-two percent of elected offices, despite being only thirty percent of the population. As a sociologist professor who teaches statistics I know that if race and gender didn’t predict these outcomes, white men would only hold thirty percent of these positions. And, no matter how much white people and men resist the inevitable societal trend towards justice as “radical” and “woke,” we will persist. Harris’s popularity is in part due to this shifting fulcrum she represents.
Naming Harris a DEI hire minimizes the significance of this moment. Vice President Harris is not simply a candidate, she is a critical part of a long movement towards social equilibrium. And, what social scientists have shown and women and people of color have long known is that in a white man’s world with the odds stacked against us, we have to assiduously keep working. We know that a multi-racial Black woman did not become the leading presidential candidate of the United States of America by resting on her laurels nor by somehow avoiding hard work, obstacles and experience. The insistence on trying to frame her as somehow undeserving is ineffectual posturing. When white men disparage DEI, a tool used to pivot towards a more just world, they are only showing what posers they truly are.
