Kamala Harris challenges Democrats, media on 'electability'

MSNBC

Sen. Kamala Harris speaking in front of the NAACP in Detroit Sunday.

Is that factor Democrats want in a presidential candidate -- electability --- just a code word for white male?

Sen. Kamala Harris, an Asian American, daughter of immigrants and a smart, outspoken woman, crossed that unspoken line and called out the Democratic Party leadership and the media about for falling into that old rut during a speech Sunday (May 5) in front of a receptive NAACP audience of 10,000.

She didn't use those exact words, but that's what she meant. 

"There has been a conversation by pundits about 'electability' and 'who can speak to the Midwest.' But when they say that, they usually put the Midwest in a simplistic box and a narrow narrative. And too often, their definition of the Midwest leaves people out," Harris said.

"It leaves out people in this room who helped build cities like Detroit. It leaves out working women who are on their feet all day -- many of them working without equal pay. And the conversation too often suggests certain voters will only vote for certain candidates regardless of whether their ideas will lift up all our families. It's shortsighted. It's wrong. And voters deserve better."

The assumption among party leaders and media is that the Midwest is made up of largely white voters who will most likely vote only for white candidates and to complete the trope, the stronger candidates -- those with the most "electability" -- are men. 

In targeting the stereotypical Midwesterner, the Democrats are ignoring the NAACP audience applauding Harris, the Hmong who won a record number of state legislators in Minnesota, the African Americans and Indian Americans in Detroit and the Arab Americans in Dearborn, Michigan.

Since the 2010 census, Iowa’s Asian American population jumped to 97,188 in 2017, from 65,154 (a 49 percent rise), while Nebraska’s grew to 61,150 in 2017, from 41,512 in 2010, (a 47 percent increase), according to Census Bureau estimates.

“General American imagination is very invested in the idea of the Midwest as a white space, and when the media refers to the Midwest what they really mean is a white family and small-town America — flyover country,” said Bich Minh Nguyen, who grew up in the Midwest. “I think that investment in the whiteness of the space is another way of saying ‘you don’t really belong here, this is not your space.’”

As if to reinforce Harris' statements, last week's Time magazine cover was of Pete Buttigeig and his spouse, Chase under the title "First Family."

In most polls, Harris is in third place behind former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders, but ahead of Beto O'Roarke. Buttigeig is in fifth. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the next woman, is a distant sixth.

The editors at Time, apparently don't think that biracial Harris, whose mother is from India and father is from Jamaica, doesn't merit the attention given to the frontrunners, both white guys, or the openly gay candidate in Buttigeig.

In the Time article about Buttigeig it is reported, "As a white man, Buttigieg may appeal to more traditional voters, yet women and voters of color are the heart of the Democratic coalition." Huffpost translates that to mean: Traditional voters = white voters.

After centuries of living with the dominance of white males and the belief of their so-called superiority, drummed into us in our history books, literature, movies and a biased criminal justice system, it's hard to break out of that one-track paradigm.

But two years living under this administration, which is trying to undo the last 60 years of  progress in order to reassert that white male dominance, it's time to discard that mistaken notion and widen our pool of smart, and capable, leaders if we want America to ascend to its ideals. 

It has taken two years of this administration to prove to us that the old paradigm can be disastrous. It has taken that long for us to realize that by widening the pool of candidates, we have a better chance of finding the leaders that we need.

The first step, though, is to redefine "electability."

The conversation around electability, Harris told the NAACP audience last weekend, “too often suggests certain voters will only vote for certain candidates regardless of whether their ideas will lift up all our families. It’s shortsighted. It’s wrong. And voters deserve better.

“As a party,” Harris said of Democrats, “we can’t let ourselves be drawn into thinking in those boxes or falling into those assumptions.”

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