Gender, Misogyny, Race/Class Questions in Presidential Election

With President Biden’s withdrawal from his presidential bid, Vice President Kamala Harris is the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party for the presidency.

Kamala Harris’s parents gave her the middle name Devi, which in Hindu Sanskrit means “Goddess.” With a Hindu Indian mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan (noted breast cancer researcher), and a Jamaican father, Professor Donald Harris (Marxist economist), Harris represents the best of what America has always been, which is a “nation of immigrants.”

The Harrises themselves are immigrants, as are Donald Trump’s Slovakian wife and the wife of his running mate, J.D. Vance, who is, like Harris, a woman born of Hindu parents. Usha Vance, like many Central American and Mexican immigrants, was born in the United States of first-generation immigrants. Usha is a successful lawyer, somewhat like so many “Dreamers.”

At the 2021 swearing-in ceremony of Biden and Harris, Harris did a shoutout to her late mother, stating in her mother’s words, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree [but] you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

This is why Harris applauded the many Black women political activists and elected officials on “whose shoulders” she stands. Harris alluded to such women as Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Mary McCleod Bethune, Anna Lee Cooper, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Daisy Bates, Amelia Boynton, Dianne Nash, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Carlotta Bass and Carlene Mitchell, Communist Party of America candidate.  

Harris firmly stated that these Black women are the “backbone of our democracy,” which she believes is deeply threatened by Trump and his motley right-wing cabal of White supremacists, anti-union reactionaries, pro-life extremists, climate-change deniers and other blind and deaf men and women such as traditional conservative GOP voters.

However, Harris said that “even in dark times, we not only dream, but we also do.” Doing the do for whatever it takes to struggle to bring about a better America more than likely came from her father, Donald Harris, a noted Marxist scholar of capitalist political economy.

Professor Harris instilled in his daughter the dictum of “study and struggle,” and Harris remembers her mother, with her child in a stroller, going to civil rights demonstrations at UC Berkeley on a wide variety of the social issues of the day. The Harris family lived in the “flatlands” hood of West Berkeley, and her mom took her two daughters, Kamala and a younger sister, Maya, to attend several Black churches.

Harris attended Howard University (also known as “the Black Harvard”) where confronting social issues was the de facto undergraduate curriculum as she attained her baccalaureate. While at Howard, she joined the Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha and laughed with her soras over dating Black men in non-amorous and amorous relationships. Harris continued her love of Black haute cuisine, oft-referred to as “soul food.”

After graduating from Howard, Harris attained her law degree in California from Hastings Law School in 1989 and, soon after, she worked as an assistant district attorney of San Francisco and eventually as the duly-elected California Attorney General.

With vast experience in criminal justice field work, Harris was involved in successfully prosecuting marijuana violators, homicides, burglaries, hustlers, robberies and sexual assaulters. It was these real experiences led her, on July 21, 2024, at a rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to forcefully express to the crowd that “I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Think Trump University, Trump Steaks, Gold Basketball shoes, stiffed subcontractors and adultery with a porn star and a Playboy playmate both without using condoms, fake two-dollar bills with his picture on them, and lastly, Trump Bibles. Trump is a snake-oil salesperson to his core.

Harris married Jewish businessperson Douglass Craig Emhoff on Aug. 22, 2014, and became a stepmom to his two adult children. However, the GOP attack dogs keep referencing her long-ago pre-marital liaison with the “Lion of the California Legislature,” longtime Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. This, for many women, is slut shaming.

Keeping up this line of attack also included references to Harris’s mixed-race ethnicity, which prompted GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson to plead with his colleagues to stop playing the race card and stick to the issues.

Harris’s personality expresses itself with a genuine smile and a gregarious laugh, but for some, this is also, somehow, to be criticized. One Republican friend recently told me that Harris was the most reviled public figure in California, and I queried in return, “Is that why she was elected San Francisco’s District Attorney and a California U.S. Senator?” My friend swallowed deeply and said not one word further.

Finally, Harris’s attempt to become President, if successful, will follow in a tardy way how other nations have, much earlier, voted women as their heads of state. Think Margret Thatcher of England, Indira Gandhi of India, Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, Sylvanie Burton of Dominica, Giotgis Meloni of Italy, Natasha Pirc Musar of Slovenia, Dina Boluarte of Peru and Droupadi Mumu of India.

These few examples beg the question, “When will the United States elect a woman to the presidency?” Will Harris, like Barack Obama, be the “chosen one,” to use Oprah Winfrey’s words?

Harris has reenergized the Democratic Party. Popular Black Journalist Roland Martin hosted a Black Star Network fundraiser called, “Black Men for Kamala.” This fundraiser and many others hosted by Black men have raised close to one and a half million dollars, and Black women raised a similar amount for Harris within the 24 hours of the announced transition.

In fact, within those 24 hours after President Biden relinquished his bid for a second presidential run, more than 40,000 new voters registered, and 24,000 volunteers joined Harris’s election campaign. And recently, the Harris campaign raised $200 million in grassroots donations and wealthy donors.

The latest announced fundraiser number now stands at $200 million and with the official endorsements of Barack and Michelle Obama, those numbers should elevate even higher. There have also been several thousand more field worker volunteers signed up.

This next presidential race will be the ultimate America’s Rubicon and, at the same time, its Gordian Knot. Electing a Black woman to lead the nation will cross that river of no return, and her victory will be like Alexander using his sword to cut through a nation’s deeply held dark beliefs per the wish of J.D. Vance to keep women barefoot and pregnant so they will not become old cat ladies.

So, will progressive women, men, the old and young, and racial minorities have the presence of mind to “do the right thing” so this nation, in the words of that old Negro spiritual, be will “free at last”? Misogyny, along with racism and the class question, are interlocking, intractable knots of American history and culture, and voters have the sword in their hands to determine Harris’s and this nation’s destiny.