“In the modern imagination,” Professor Lewis Gordon wrote in 2023, paraphrasing philosopher Frantz Fanon, “reason takes flight whenever the Black enters the scene.” Indeed, from the moment the Democratic Party coalesced around Vice President Kamala Harris as its nominee, ushering in the prospect of America’s first Black Madam President, reason has taken flight.
“Apparently, they feel, or a lot of Democrats feel, they have to stick with her because of her ethnic background,” Republican Representative Glenn Grothman said on the day President Biden ended his reelection campaign. Two of his House GOP colleagues, Tim Burchett and Harriett Hageman, both denigrated Harris as a “DEI hire.” And then, of course, there’s Harris’s opponent, Donald Trump, who has questioned whether Harris, whose father is Jamaican and mother is Indian, is even Black.
Harris “was only promoting Indian heritage … and now she wants to be known as Black, so I don’t know,” Donald Trump said during a panel hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists. “Is she Indian or is she Black? She was Indian all the way and all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person and I think someone should look into that.” And in his train wreck of a press conference on August 8, he claimed Harris was being “very disrespectful to both” identities. “Whether it’s Indian or Black, I think it’s very disrespectful to both,” he said. “To me it doesn’t matter.”
So a white man who only won the presidency thanks to an electoral institution that was designed by enslavers to seize disproportionate voting power—what law professor Wilfred Codrington III describes as “the nation’s oldest structural racial........