As Harris Launches Pioneering Candidacy, Conservative Pundits Aim At Her Heritage
Journalists are, as the maxim has it, in the first draft of history business.
Kamala Harris is seeking to make history.
And a tension arises as news organizations try to capture and characterize what the candidate is up to. Some celebrated her pioneering status, at least for a day. Others sought to pick her apart by creating questions about her identity.
She was given a heroic treatment by several major news organizations recognizing her many firsts; she is the first Black woman to run for national office on a major party ticket. She is also the first Asian American to do so. She is the daughter of immigrants. She'll become just the fourth woman to be nominated for one of the two top slots. And so on.
The announcement that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden picked Harris as his running mate dominated the front pages of USA Today and the New York Times Wednesday for example, with striking photos that could appear in movie posters.
MSNBC host Mika Brzezynski, a strong Trump critic, laughed joyously as she introduced a video clip of Biden making the announcement. "See, this is a just a great Joe Biden trait," Brzezynski told viewers. "He's not afraid of having a strong woman by his side."
Harris has a lengthy résumé: San Francisco District Attorney; California attorney general; U.S. Senator.
It's all fair game for dissection. Politico columnist Jack Shafer challenged the political press corps' pliant positivism. "There's nothing like a political promotion, especially one that could lead to a presidency, to make the press corps adjust the seasoning and serving presentation on a candidate," Shafer wrote. "Yesterday, Harris was just another overbaked politician. Today, she's fresh as can be, and the press corps can't stop salivating."
Partly, he acknowledged, the treatment had to do with the pioneering nature of her candidacy.
In the conservative media, however, pundits wielded Harris' identity against her.
On Fox News, longtime Republican operative Ari Fleischer suggested black Americans simply wouldn't embrace Harris. "She's just not that historically exciting to African Americans," Fleischer said Tuesday night. "She certainly wasn't during the [Democratic presidential] primary - and that was one of the biggest reasons Biden picked her. He needs that boost in African American turnout in order to win. I just don't see it."
Some Fox journalists sought to temper their colleagues' assessments that she was a leftist or extremist. Chris Wallace told viewers, "She is not far to the left despite what Republicans are going to try to say." Anchor Martha McCallum tweeted: "she is accomplished, young and a fighter." Political anchor Bret Baier said her choice "sent a powerful message" for young Asian or Black girls.
Yet Fleischer wasn't the only one whose remarks questioned Harris' authenticity for Black voters. His argument was fleshed out further by Mark Levin - a conservative legal pundit - speaking just hours after the pick was named. "Kamala Harris is not an African American," he told viewers on his show for the conservative site the Blaze. "She is Indian and Jamaican. Jamaica is in the Caribbean. India is" - he paused - "out there near China." "Out there near China" as a description of the world's most populous democracy is its own special brand of geographic dismissiveness. Yet Kamala Harris - the daughter of a mother from India and a father from Jamaica - was born in Oakland, Calif. She grew up in Berkeley before moving to Montreal with her mother and sister. She has described herself most simply as American.Though herself Asian, Harris' mother brought her up with a strong sense of Black identity, though Harris' parents divorced and her father was no longer a strong presence. Harris chose to attend a leading historically black U.S. college, Howard University, and even pledged AKA - a premier black sorority. Harris has referred to herself as Black and African American, as well as embracing her Indian roots.
Even so, Levin who also has a weekly show on Fox News, focused like a laser beam on her heritage in the opening of his program for the Blaze: "Her ancestry does not go back to American slavery. To the best of my knowledge, her ancestry doesn't go back to slavery at all." Cornell historian Margaret Washington has spent her decades-long career studying the American South and slavery. Washington tells NPR that Levin appears to be willfully missing the point, in an effort to peel Black voters away from Harris, and ultimately from voting for Biden too.
"The Americas represent two hemispheres and Jamaica was a slave society. And so why is she any less African-American than I am?" Washington asked. "We are all Americans, and those of us who have African heritage are African-Americans." Some conservatives such as Dinesh D'Souza have revived a piece written by Harris' father in which he said he was descended from a notorious white Irish slaveowner in Jamaica. The link has not been conclusively proven, according to journalistic explorations of the claim by Snopes and others; if so, the mother of the slaveowner's child who was her ancestor has not been identified. Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh and far-right online conspiracist Alex Jones claimed this shows she was not descended from slaves.
Washington says the one possibility hardly rules out the other.
"Not many black people in the Americas are free of the stigma of white blood. It is the case that slaveholders had sex with their slaves and and had children who were biracial," Washington says. "It was the case not only in the United States. It was even more so the case in a country like Jamaica. And it was the case in India where her mother was from."
All three nations are former British colonies, she argues, "cut from the same cloth."
What Levin and some other conservatives are doing, she says, is "a way of characterizing people who are biracial as not really being Black. That's what they did with [President] Obama. I think that's what they're attempting with Kamala Harris."
The media's record reporting on pioneering candidates is mixed. Geraldine Ferraro, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton all periodically endured sexist strains to coverage. The press was mocked for falling for candidate Barack Obama's charisma on the trail, yet it took years to find ways to convey that untruthful assertions from political opponents and critics about his schooling in Indonesia and his birth were lies, not merely valid points of view.
Right on schedule, Newsweek this week published a column by a conservative law professor who argued that Harris isn't eligible to run for vice president because her parents were immigrants and not citizens at the time of her birth. (A decade ago, the professor came in second in a Republican primary race for California's state attorney general. Harris ultimately won the office that year.)
The article follows the legal logic that has been widely discounted by legal scholars, including other prominent conservatives.
As a journalistic matter, it represents a revival of the playbook deployed by large segments of the conservative media that indulged the racist birther claims against the nation's first black president. [Copyright 2020 NPR]
