‘America Will Be Ready for a Black Woman President’: Supporters Revel in Harris’s Candidacy
Historic nominee will come against movement based on “white grievance”
It’s been an incredibly eventful week since Vice President Kamala Harris launched her surprise bid for the presidency. Not only has she lost none of her luster, she continues to electrify Democrats and other supporters with the potential to elect the nation’s first Black woman as president — including other Black Americans.
Harris almost immediately became the presumptive Democratic nominee last week after President Biden chose to exit the race for reelection and endorsed her to succeed him.
She locked up support from enough delegates to the Democratic National Convention in order to secure the nomination. She’s also raised more than $126 million and recruited more than 100,000 volunteers just in the first days of her candidacy.
“That’s the type of grass-roots mobilization and engagement that does remind me of Barack Obama as well. I expect that to continue to grow,” said Juanita Tolliver, a veteran political strategist and political analyst. “The call and the video of the Obamas endorsing Kamala Harris is the start of an even bigger engagement with them both before and after the convention.
“I’m hearing whispers about a potential Obama engagement in Georgia next week. I’m hearing things about how he will be sharing more about their story and their ties in politics on the convention stage. Voters better buckle up,” she added.
Sen Cory Booker (D-NJ), a former colleague from Harris’s days in the Senate, also was enthusiastic about the vice president’s candidacy.
“I know what it is like to fight with her in the trenches and we are excited to be in a period where America will see how extraordinary she is,” he said. “She is a grass ceiling breaker, a history maker. She is somebody who is relentless, who is prepared, who has a sense of excellence and possibility.”
Veteran legal journalist Elie Mystal rejected the notion that the nation’s not ready to elect a Black woman as president.
“I don't buy the idea that America is not ready. Because America has, by my clock, six months to get ready. Right? We got six months to get ready for what’s coming, and that’s the only important thing,” he said. “America will be ready for a Black woman president once America votes for a Black woman president, and there are all these reasons why we should vote for Harris over the dictator who says that this will be the last election anybody has to vote for at all. Like there are all sorts of reasons to support Harris in this election and America will get ready.
“This idea that it always needs to be later, that we are perpetually not ready for this or that change, that we all know everybody is asking for too much, too soon. Most other major western democracies have already cleared this really basic low hurdle of full equality in electing a woman leader,” Mystal added. “We are behind. We are retrograde compared to the rest of the world on this issue.”
Still, Harris faces an opposition in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement fueled by “white grievance,” according to Eddie Glaude Jr, an author and professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.
“This ain’t 2008. This is not the Tea Party, all of this stuff is explicit, MAGA has its roots, its origins in explicit white grievance. That’s what it’s all about,” he said. “And so, you can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube. Again, this is not 2008. This is post the Obama presidency. So hatred, grievance, it’s been the engine the gasoline, the fuel, to this entire movement.
“So the fact that we expect because of the attempted assassination that Donald Trump was going to be more civil — give me a break,” Glaude added. “But the moment the Democratic Party chose to put Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket — and remember, there were forces within the Democratic Party who understood the environment: they were worried about having a person of color at the top of the ticket because they thought I would excite and agitate a base on the other side that was motivated by racial grievance in the first place.”
Please support our work…
Please subscribe…