The best way to introduce this post is to quote Kamala Harris' response to a debate question about race. "I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us."
The second-best way (even though there can be no such thing), assuming you have not read his NY Times columns, is to introduce linguistics professor John McWhorter. His is a discipline that has long interested me, defined by one university as the "scientific study of language" and its focus on "the systematic investigation of the properties of particular languages as well as the characteristics of language in general." Note: My approach is deeply unscientific.
I bring up McWhorter because of his 29 August piece, "The not-so-secret meaning of all the 'joy.'" By the air quote he meant "not just joy but JOY ... surrounding the elevation of Kamala Harris." The linguist, who is black, argued that this particular joy "is a result of one fact: that Harris is Black." And, he continued, the joy of her blackness is unjustified in that it treats her as a product of her skin color.
McWhorter sees this singular "fact" of Harris joy as a universal phenomenon, and he added another comprehensive element to his argument. "The thing sweeping so many people up is the idea [of] her being ... a Black woman at that." (Italics mine.)
I disagree intensely with him on both scores. I'd never enter a debate with linguist McWhorter, simply because I as a disciplinary amateur would be crushed by him the scientific professional. But on the politics and social relations of his argument I could hold my own. More than that, I believe I'd win the match.
I'll state my case in personal terms — but primarily as a microcosm of American society at large. What occurred to me, what shocked me in the way of suprise, when I read McWhorter's August column was this: When Harris went from understudy to Biden's starring role, not once did I think of her as a person of color. To stress this paragraph's initial point, I say this only as an infinitesimally small yet representative part of modern American society.
As recently as the Obama era I could not have made that remark. Of that I'm sure. But again, and far more importantly, nether could society at large have made the observance. We as a whole have striven for years to arrive where we are on the "question" of race, which is to say, at least as far as race in a presidential contest is concerned. Indeed we have arrived.
I apply the same assessment to the question of gender. McWhorter sees that, too, as a Harris identifier. Reaching back to the Obama era once more, I would have wholeheartedly agreed with him when the winner of the primary contest defeated the woman Hillary Clinton. Yet I gave no more thought to Harris the woman than I did to Harris the black woman.
I appreciate the danger in what I write here. Some will see it as Carpenter shamelessly blowing his own horn, boasting to all about his uncommonly vast catholicity of thought. Those who see it that way I most likely would never persuade otherwise, so I won't try. My argument is merely that I see McWhorter's as outdated, even antediluvian when you think of the tremendous progress we Americans have made in such a short span of time.
The essential addendum to my I-as-an-extreme-societal-micrososm you have anticipated: Hardly all Americans possess this liberality of thought (or non-thought?). A few days ago I ran across the following passage and saved it. I also forgot to save the messenger's link. Sorry about that.
"Harris has also resisted taking the bait. Last month, during a TV conversation about U.S. foreign policy, the Fox News host Jesse Watters speculated about her getting 'paralyzed in the Situation Room while the generals have their way with her.' Rather than reacting to the comment Harris and her campaign have ridiculed the right’s anti-woman rhetoric and policies, tarring her attackers as 'weird' instead of lending them credibility."
Harris' approach on gender is a smart one; Watters', Fox News', all Watterite Fox Newsers' and the entire right wing's approach is characteristically imbecile. Theirs is before-the-flood thinking on gender as well as race, fostered by a man whose supreme characteristics are imbecility, misogyny, misanthropy and every morbid ology, emphasis on psychopathology.
Yes mine is an opinion, not a sociological fact I can at this hurried moment substantiate with a collection of facts. Nevertheless I do believe there are more Americans who've lost the gendered and racial impressions of the past than there are Trumpists still residing there, and wallowing in it.
I agree with Kamala Harris' belief that "the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us." And we know it without thinking about it.
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