The Democratic Party is about to run a Black, South Asian woman against a white supremacist former president. It’s about to run a person whose parents were immigrants against a xenophobe who supports mass deportations. It’s about to run a woman who prosecuted sexual predators against a sexual predator who has been judged to be a rapist. And it’s about to run a fierce defender of reproductive rights against a person who proudly claims responsibility for overturning Roe v. Wade.

Add it all up, and what you get is that the Democrats are about to run the walking embodiment of what America is against the avenging specter of what America was.

The contrast between Vice President Kamala Harris and convicted felon Donald Trump could not be more clear, and that contrast should benefit Harris in every conceivable way. Harris is a person who wouldn’t be allowed to finish her sentences in Trump’s America, much less hold political and legal power. The distinction is now between a youthful, vibrant, and tolerant vision of the country, versus an aging, aggrieved, and absolutist version of America.

Democrats should be thrilled with the opportunity to run Donald Trump’s worst nightmare against Donald Trump. And the base is. ActBlue, the small-dollar donations aggregator, smashed fundraising records on the first day of Harris’s presidential campaign. Elder party poohbas and young rising Democratic stars all quickly endorsed Harris for president. “Win With Black Women,” a network of Black women grassroots organizers, had a call last night that broke Zoom, and ended up with over 40,000 participants who raised over a million dollars for Harris.

The contrast Harris provides to Trump is her greatest electoral asset, a thing that is energizing the very people Trump would harm the most—but we, as a nation, are about to endure weeks and months of people telling us that it is her greatest weakness. The question “Is America ready for a Black, female president?” will be posed again and again by people who will claim that they already know the answer is “no.” Even as Harris consolidates the entire Democratic Party around her and her campaign, there will be people telling her she can’t win because America won’t elect a woman of color.

And those naysayers will always be given a platform in The New York Times and other media outlets claiming they’re simply reporting the facts. The Times won’t cover Harris fairly even for a day, just to see what it would feel like, and they’ve already started down the road of making her seem unelectable because of her race and gender. For the first of what will be many hit pieces over the next few months, they used other Black people to make their point. A tortured Monday headline blared: “Some Black Voters Say They Wonder if a Black Woman Can Win.”

Current Issue

November 2024 Issue

Before I dive into the article, I want you to step back and just marvel at the sheer meaninglessness of that headline. I, for instance, am a Black voter, and I wonder about a great many things. I wonder if aliens exist; I wonder if God is an asshole; I wonder how many abortions Donald Trump has paid for. But the Times wouldn’t run a story that stated “Some Black Voters Say They Wonder How Many Active Klu Klux Klan Members Attended the Republican National Convention”—even though I promise you that more Black voters wonder about that than Harris’s electability. What the Times is doing here isn’t journalism but confirmation bias: They wanted to run that kind of story and went out and found some people to say what they wanted them to say.

And what those allegedly contemplative Black voters said was an all-too-standard refrain.

“It’s kind of sad, but I don’t think Harris will do well nationwide,” said Kristy Smith, 42, who is from Atlanta and works in sales.

As a Black woman herself, Smith said she thinks Ms. Harris is entering the race with two strikes against her. “America is just not ready for a woman president especially not a Black woman president,” she said.

In fairness to Smith, she is merely repeating what this country has told Black people, and especially Black women, her whole life: America hates you. Every Black or brown person, and every woman, has direct evidence from their lived experience of just how deeply America hates them. It’s palpable. We see the disdain this country holds for people of color whenever we turn on the news. We feel the antipathy this country holds for women every time we go to work, or read an opinion from the Supreme Court. Harris has been subjected to the worst press coverage of any vice president in my lifetime, and she’s about to be subjected to the worst coverage of any presidential candidate in American history… save perhaps Hillary Clinton, who was the last woman who made it within striking distance of the presidency.

This is part of the very serious work of white male supremacy. It’s not enough for white men to be in control of all the levers of power; they—and those who do their bidding—also have to make everybody else feel like they don’t deserve power and won’t be able to have any even if they try. The white guys who are determined to keep running this joint need the rest of us to believe that asking for equal opportunity and a fair shake is asking for too much, and that demanding equality now is perpetually too soon. Maybe someday a person like Kamala Harris could be president, but not today, never today; America is just not ready for all that right now.

Self-adopting racist or misogynist narratives has been a key feature of oppressed people both here and all over the world. Supremacist regimes are always willing to use fear and violence to maintain their positions, but it’s a lot easier for them when oppressed people defeat themselves by despairing at the possibility for change.

Throughout the rest of this campaign, we will hear people adopt another classic “it’s not me, it’s them” formulation to attack Harris’s prospects: “I am ready for a Black woman president,” they will say, “but others are not.” Or they’ll say: “I’d vote for a Black woman, but not that Black woman.” Keli Goff at The Daily Beast already raised her hand to be wrong in this particular way, when she wrote: “I strongly believe a woman—a Black woman—can become president of the United States. I just don’t believe Kamala Harris can.”

And remember, this is what’s happening in the first hours of the campaign against Harris. Right now, those in the media who are already aligned against her are finding the vanishingly small number of Black women who are “wondering” about Harris and pumping them full of enough helium to float the Hindenburg. But when that doesn’t work—when that fails to produce the desired effect of having Harris say, “Sorry for bothering all you white folks with my existence. I’m going to retire now”—the white guys will really put their backs into it. I can already see David Brooks and Bret Stephens clacking away on their keyboards, doing everything in their power to call Harris unqualified, unintelligent, and undeserving of the office she seeks. It is going to get real ugly, really quickly, from exactly the people you would expect.

But I am not afraid. I am not afraid of these people who will tell us to be afraid. I am not afraid of supporting a Black, South Asian, first-generation woman for president, and I’m certainly not afraid of supporting her because she’s a Black, South Asian daughter of immigrants. I reject the programming that’s designed to make me think a woman of color can’t win, and I embrace the fact that she can.

I really don’t give a damn if other people won’t vote for Harris because of who she is, because those other people were never on my side to begin with. We were always going to have to defeat those other people if we were going to stop the re-installation of Trump. Don’t let them lie to you. Most of the people who aren’t going to vote for Harris weren’t going to vote for Joe Biden and wouldn’t have voted for whatever hypothetical white male liberal you’ve dreamed up in your head as more appealing than the accomplished woman of color standing right in your face. But, as the last 36 hours have shown, plenty of people who weren’t thrilled about showing up for Biden seem pretty damn stoked to get out and vote for Harris.

Mostly, though, I’m not afraid because of some advice my mother gave me a long time ago. My wife and I were thinking of having children, but I was afraid. I wondered how I could possibly be ready to be a dad and take care of an actual child, when I was barely able to take care of myself. I brought these concerns to my mother, and she told me that I didn’t have to be ready to have a kid; I only had to be ready to start getting ready to have a kid. Human biology, in its infinite wisdom, would give me nine months to get ready: “And think of everything you can learn in nine months, think of how much you learned in, say, nine months of law school.” I’d be ready, my mom assured me, when I had to be.

She was right. I made myself ready.

I don’t know, or care, if America is “ready” to have a Black woman president right now, because America has more than enough time to get itself ready. If you’re not already there, I suggest you download some kind of app “What to Expect While Expecting a Black Woman President” or something. But this is what we’re doing now. Harris is how we beat that guy.

Either we listen to the Black lady and let her help us, or we consign our country to an authoritarian takeover. I’m not afraid of that choice. Instead, I am excited and energized by the opportunity to beat Trump and the entire media echo-sphere, from The New York Times on down, with the very version of America they hate the most.

They are not ready for her, but she is ready to beat them.