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Is America ready to elect a black president?

2024-09-15 13:35:57Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Kamala Harris

Is America ready for a black president? That's the big question that has loomed over Kamala Harris' presidential campaign since the beginning: Is the United States ready for an African-American woman president?

This is the question I ask myself whenever I talk about American politics. And this is also a question that experts, observers keep asking, without ever getting an answer.

This is because the question is ultimately unanswerable. It's so loaded that answering it requires a lot of history, cultural knowledge, judgment, and speculation.

While the question hints at racism and sexism deeply rooted in the fabric of American politics and culture, it doesn't directly address these things, leaving assumptions about how sexist and racist the country might be.

Asking whether America is "ready" also assumes that history is progressing—that things are moving forward in a relatively straight line. It suggests that in the past America was not ready for a black woman president, but at some point in the future it might be. It assumes, as Martin Luther King Jr. once so beautifully put it, that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Like most of King's teachings, this idea is flattened into an assumption that "progress" is inevitable—that women and people of color will eventually have equal representation and treatment as society learns, gradually, to become more just. tolerant and accepting.

He assumes that, one day, the United States will live up to its founding ideal that "all men are created equal."

But, as Harris himself has said, the United States has not always lived up to its ideals. Progress on equality – especially in its extension beyond the exclusively white men identified in the Constitution – has been slow and disappointing. It has also been marred by violence, even war.

History is not a march forward.

Are you ready?

Many other countries have shown that it is possible to be "ready" for a woman leader at various points in their history.

India elected Indira Gandhi as prime minister in 1966. Gandhi served for more than a decade, and then again from 1980 to 1984, when she was assassinated. Every leader since then has been a man.

Similarly, the United Kingdom elected its first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in 1979. After Thatcher resigned in 1990, the UK did not have another female leader until Theresa May from 2016–19 and then Liz Truss in 2022.

In Australia, Julia Gillard won a very close election to become prime minister in 2010, only to lose to a man four years later. There has been no speculation that a woman, much less a woman of color, could ascend to the leadership of any major party in the decade since. And could Australia be considered "ready" for a woman leader in that period, given how Gillard was treated during her tenure as prime minister?

New Zealand has a stronger record. Jenny Shipley became the first woman prime minister in 1997 clashing with the leader of the coalition government. Helen Clark was then the first woman to be elected Prime Minister in 1999, followed by Jacinda Ardern almost two decades later in 2017.

While Britain, New Zealand, and Australia share some political and cultural similarities with the United States, they have different political structures. Unlike the US, their leaders are not directly elected, making the specific identity of the leader less of a focus of the election.

Other countries with direct elections, however, have also been "ready" for women leaders at one point or another. In 1980, Iceland became the first country in the world to directly elect a woman to the presidency. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir served for 16 years. Deeply conservative Ireland was also nearly 30 years ago, directly electing its first female president, Mary Robinson, in 1990.

Structural inequality

For the most part, however, these women are exceptions to the structural gender inequality entrenched in politics around the world—albeit a reality most clearly reflected in the American experience.

That the issue of "preparedness" remains so prominent reflects the underlying reality of the unequal representation of women, especially black women and women of color, not only in America but in most democratic countries.

In June of this year, UN Women noted that only 27 countries currently have female leaders. It said:

At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be achieved for another 130 years.

The idea of ??a "ladder" of progress once again assumes that the world will be ready for women leaders one day (even if that day may be more than a century away).

Surprisingly, the same structural inequality is reflected below the highest levels of leadership. UN Women found only 15 countries where women hold at least 50% of cabinet ministerial posts. And when women do take leadership positions, it is often in areas traditionally understood as "women's" or "minority" issues, such as social services or indigenous affairs.

This general trend is also reflected in the USA. After the most recent US election, Congress has a "record number" of women. However, it is still only 28%.

Similarly, in Australia, research from the Australia Institute found that women are underrepresented in seven of Australia's nine parliaments.

However, this should not undermine the important achievements of women and people of color, who have long fought for a seat at the table of power – often at great personal risk.

According to the Pew Research Center, the current US Congress is also the most racially and ethnically diverse in history, with 133 representatives and senators identifying their ethnicity as something other than non-Hispanic white.

And in 2021, Harris became the first woman of South Asian descent and the first black woman to become vice president of the United States. In another historic moment, President Joe Biden appointed the first Native American woman to a cabinet position – Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.

A milestone was also reached in Australia when Linda Burney became the first Aboriginal woman to serve as Minister for Indigenous Affairs in 2022.

The weaponization of gender and race

However, none of this can confirm or deny the "readiness" of the United States - or any other country - to elect a black woman leader.

There are signs that a significant portion of the American electorate is unwilling to vote a woman, let alone a woman of color, into the highest position of power.

Much attention, rightly, has focused on the current Republican candidates' attitudes toward gender and race. Vice presidential nominee JD Vance, for example, has made numerous comments about women, such as his insistence that "ladies without children" have too much power. Donald Trump has also repeatedly attacked women with sexist comments, made lewd comments about women's bodies, and been found liable in a civil court for sexual assault.

Trump, Vance and others like them use race and gender to delegitimize their opponents, suggesting they are unfit for positions of power.

Such misogynistic attacks are a common experience for women in politics.

As a black woman, Harris faces attacks on both her race and her gender. Right-wing figures have repeatedly dismissed her as a "DEI" (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) candidate, suggesting she has only gotten as far as she has because of special treatment based not on her merit but in her identity.

Adopting once again a tactic he reinforced during Barack Obama's presidency, Trump has also repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of Harris as vice president and her candidacy.

Context matters

Not long ago, many people assumed that Hillary Clinton would win the race to be "first." When she accepted the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, she stood, symbolically, under a glass ceiling that was expected to shatter at any moment.

A few months later, that ceiling was quickly reshaped.

But even Clinton's loss in 2016 cannot conclusively prove that America was not "ready" for a woman president. Context is crucial.

Even those voters who might be "ready" for a woman president will not vote for any woman. They will make decisions based on complex, interrelated factors, including a candidate's policy positions.

The role that both Bill and Hillary Clinton played in enacting free trade agreements — from Bill Clinton's oversight of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to Hillary Clinton's support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership — is debatable. (TPP) – alongside economic stagnation. in the US, played a much bigger role in Clinton's defeat than her gender. And her characterization of alienated voters as "a basket of deplorables" certainly didn't help.

Clinton had significant political baggage after decades in the spotlight. The political, economic, and historical circumstances of the 2016 presidential race—along with Trump's political ascendancy—are impossible to disentangle.

Similarly, while some Britons might have voted for Thatcher because she was a woman, many voted for her because of her conservative policy positions, or perhaps because they most disapproved of her opponents.

Decades later and politically worlds apart, Harris is under pressure from a critical section of her party's base to modify her position on Israel. This is a serious and urgent policy issue that has nothing to do with her race or gender and everything to do with competing visions of the United States' role in the world. And it will influence the decisions of many voters in November.

Simply put, it cannot be conclusively argued that Clinton lost in 2016 because America was not "ready" for a woman. Or circumstances have changed so much that the country can now be considered ready.

In a different context, with a different candidate and a different political platform, America might have been “ready” in 2016. Another woman—like, say, the unflinchingly popular Michelle Obama—might have been able to defeat Trump. Or not? We just have no way of knowing.

Even if we did, we still couldn't know if America was finally "ready" for a woman of color to lead.

Kamala Harris' "Firsts".

However, at this year's Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Hillary Clinton reflected on the possibility of "firsts" and the progress of American history. She proclaimed that "a future where there are no ceilings in our dreams" had finally arrived.

Harris, too, is focused on the future — but not on her "firsts."

In her first media interview since becoming the Democratic nominee, for example, she dismissed a question about Trump's focus on her race. Her campaign has successfully framed any specific focus on gender or race – and especially on women's bodies – as “weird”.

In this way, the Harris campaign has firmly shifted the focus of identity politics back to Trump and Vance.

Harris' campaign is reinforcing this framework by focusing not on individual "firsts," but on structural gender and racial inequality and women's fundamental rights to bodily autonomy. In this way, the campaign is embracing a collective feminism, rather than the individualistic, 1990s-style, "white women" feminism that is harsher on Clinton

Harris' campaign is explicitly eschewing the seductive shallowness of identity politics, learning the lessons of an often charged Clinton campaign that seemed to assume Americans would vote for her precisely because she was a woman, or because it was time America , finally, to elect a woman president.

All of this is, at least implicitly, a recognition that "readiness" is not a simple question with a straightforward answer. Harris' campaign acknowledges that it's not necessarily a matter of collective "readiness," but of getting enough Americans who are already ready to be inspired and mobilized.

As Biden has repeatedly said, "women are not without […] electoral or political power". According to one analysis, in the four years since 2020, black female voter registration has increased by 98.4%. Among young black women, it has increased by 175.8%.

American women of color are clearly ready for this moment. theconversation/ Adaptation in Albanian: 'Si'


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