Kamala’s Moment

The Precise Time Department sounds like something from a story by Jorge Luis Borges, but it is a real subdivision of the US Navy. At the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris has her official residence, the department maintains the Master Clock with which all others in the military system are harmonized. At the end of the driveway that leads from the vice-president’s house, there is a public display of these exact hours, minutes, and seconds set beside a huge ship’s anchor, as though this superaccurate chronometer served to hold America steady and prevent it from coming unmoored. Such reassurance seems, of course, ever more illusory.

There is a melancholy evocation of the Master Clock and its merciless motions at the start of Promise Me, Dad (2017), Joe Biden’s account of his public and private lives in 2014. Biden was then living at the Naval Observatory as vice-president to Barack Obama. Leaving the residence for his family’s annual Thanksgiving gathering in Nantucket, he seemed momentarily mesmerized:

I glanced at the squat, standing digital clock at the top of the driveway, as I had maybe a thousand times since we had moved into the official residence. Red numbers glowed, ticking away in metronomic perfection: 5:11:42, 5:11:43, 5:11:44, 5:11:45…. Precise Time—synchronized to the millisecond—had been deemed an operational imperative by the Department of Defense, which had troops and bases in locations around the globe. 5:11:50, 5:11:51, 5:11:52.

Our limousine was already accelerating out of the turn with an abrupt force that pushed me back into the soft leather seats. The clock was behind us in a flash, out of sight, but still marking the time as it melted away—5:11:58, 5:11:59, 5:12:00.

For Biden, time was melting away. He did not get to be his party’s nominee for president in 2016, and that in turn meant that he would be too old to stand for a second term in 2024. Hard as he tried, he could not, in the end, escape the clock’s relentless indifference to his desire to stay in power. But for Harris, the glowing red numbers that haunted Biden may mark the precise time. They have hurried her to a moment not just of personal destiny but of historic fate.

Harris’s rapid coronation as the Democratic candidate for the presidency is at once quite fortuitous and utterly timely. It might be called an accident that’s been waiting to happen. An accident because were it not for a series of unprecedented events—Biden’s becoming the oldest president in US history, his disintegration in a live televised debate, Donald Trump’s political resurgence after an attempted coup and personal resurrection after an attempted assassination—neither she nor any other Black woman would have become the candidate of either of the two main parties. The time, in conventional wisdom, would not have been right. The voters would not have been ready. The clock would have to tick on through endless cycles before the day arrived when it would feel safe to have, at the top of the ticket, an embodiment of American power that was neither white nor male.

And yet it was an accident waiting to happen because this conventional wisdom is itself out of sync with a nation in which white men make up just 30 percent of the population. This is the minority that benefits from a spectacular application of positive discrimination in the political sphere: it accounts for close to two thirds of officeholders. By contrast, only three Black women—Shirley Chisholm in 1972, Carol Moseley Braun in 2004, and Harris in 2020—have previously even sought a major party’s presidential nomination, and only three (including Harris) have served in the Senate. No Black woman has been elected as a governor, and only twenty-five have held other senior statewide offices, such as lieutenant governor, attorney general, or secretary of state.

Time shapes contemporary American politics in two additional ways—anachronism and gerontocracy. Biden, because of who he is, seemed to embody both the superannuated nature of America’s political class and its overrepresentation of white men of the baby boomer generation. Harris, because of who she is, is uniquely placed to call time on both these realities—which means, first of all, calling time on Donald Trump. If she frames her campaign effectively, Harris can make Trump a throwback and herself the embodiment of a future that has already taken shape in American demography.

That campaign can and must be about the things that affect people’s daily lives—jobs, health care, education, the climate crisis. But ticking away underneath it is another kind of question: Who is a normal American now? Harris’s choice of running mate suggests she is aware of this: the avuncular Minnesota governor Tim Walz has a gift for making progressive ideals seem familiar, ordinary, and rooted in down-home common sense. Meanwhile, Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, implicitly appeal to a more symbolic notion of representation: however complex and diverse American society might seem to be, its essential form is male, white, and at least culturally Christian. This has always been so in the past and must always be so in the future. If demography, and therefore democracy, is flowing away from this eternal truth, then democracy must be frozen in time. When Trump told a right-wing Christian audience on July 26 that if they vote “just this time,” they “won’t have to do it anymore,” he was putting forward his own notion of the end of history. The changes that are making the US more ethnically diverse, less comfortably patriarchal, and less Christian will be permanently checked because the institutions of power will have been made safe from their effects.

Part of the problem with Biden’s candidacy was that, for vastly more benign reasons, it drew on a parallel idea of holding back a tide of change. Biden presented himself, not without reason, as a bulwark, the only immovable object that could stop the apparently unstoppable Trump. As the Democratic candidate, Harris has rightly taken up Biden’s message that the election in November is, as the outgoing president put it in his address from the Oval Office on July 24, about “saving our democracy.” But her candidacy carries a much stronger resonance. It says that saving American democracy is not at all the same thing as preserving it.

Biden used the metaphor made famous by John F. Kennedy when he became, at forty-three, the second-youngest president in US history: “I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.” But the torch of American democracy must be envisaged as a flickering flame. In her rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention on August 19, Hillary Clinton spoke of how “every generation has carried the torch forward.” It is not a secure and fixed inheritance that can be handed down as a bequest from one generation to the next. It is a dangerous and endangered idea that must always draw fuel from new sources. American democracy cannot be saved if it is not reimagined, deepened, expanded, and brought into line with contemporary American realities. It is open to Harris to embody the energy of that urgent updating. Indeed, she can scarcely do otherwise.

It would be good to live in a world where Harris’s gender and ethnicity were irrelevant and where she was judged solely on her record and ideas. But if there is any such world, it does not include the US. Trump, Vance, and the Republican Party will not permit such a possibility. Their reactionary mindset is obsessed with human biology—Harris, for them, is inescapably defined by her chromosomes. The idea of the reproduction of America through the generations is projected onto her body. So far as we know, none of the forty-five occupants to date of the Oval Office has given birth to a child—but in Harris’s case this nonevent is a neglect of biological duty that makes her, in Vance’s words, one of the “childless cat ladies” who don’t “have a direct stake” in the country’s future. The point of this contention is precisely that it is a claim on the future. Tomorrow belongs to Vance and those who look and think like him.

Harris does, of course, have children through her marriage to Doug Emhoff, but because she did not give birth to them, Vance cited her first among the ranks of “people without children.” This, crucially, excludes her from the norm and indeed makes her the prime example of those who “hate normal Americans for choosing family.”

But it’s not just that Harris has failed to give birth; it is also that she has failed to be properly born. John Eastman, a coconspirator in Trump’s efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election, sought the Republican nomination for California attorney general in 2010, the year Harris won that office. In August 2020 Newsweek published an op-ed by Eastman protesting that “before we so cavalierly accept Senator Harris’ eligibility for the office of vice president, we should ask her a few questions about the status of her parents at the time of her birth.” He claimed (on spurious constitutional grounds) that since (as he thought) Harris’s parents were in the United States on temporary visas when she was born in October 1964, she

owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers—Jamaica, in the case of her father, and India, in the case of her mother—and was therefore not entitled to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment as originally understood.

At the time Trump amplified this bogus allegation, describing Eastman as a “very highly qualified, very talented lawyer” and remarking that

I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements…. I have no idea if that’s right, I would’ve—I would have assumed the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president…. That’s…very serious.

On August 19, as the Democratic convention was opening, Trump returned to this theme, asking of the Democrats: “I wonder if they knew where she comes from.” In this upending of the idea of birthright, Harris has no right to be American because she was born wrong. If there’s a genre underpinning the Republican disdain for Harris, it’s a nativity play that has become a horror movie. In Eastman’s narrative, she was already, at the very moment of her birth, a traitor to America, loyal to two foreign powers. According to Vance’s rhetoric, this misbegotten woman has grown up to be the potential begetter of a sterile American future.

No major candidate for the presidency has ever been attacked with both these biological weapons. Barack Obama had to face down Trump’s birther lies but not the other natalist assault as well. No one said he hated ordinary Americans because he had not brought his own pregnancy to term. Yet it is the very unprecedented nature of this double assault on her bodily being that also gives Harris an exceptional power. She knows how to deal with this stuff—she has been doing so all her life, with considerable grace.

It seems telling that Trump has had to abandon his mocking nickname for her, Laffin’ Kamala, presumably because of a belated realization that her laughter—so different from his own cruel comedy—seems to most people to express optimism, youthfulness, and a joy in life, all qualities that he (as well as Biden) so patently lacks. She politicizes the idea of being comfortable in one’s own skin. And in that comfort, there is a paradoxical kind of potency. She can be extremely radical by presenting herself merely as what she is. For if Harris really is a “normal American” (as of course she is), it can only be because the American norm has been transformed. It can be possible because the torch has already been passed not just to a new generation but to new forms of personal and collective self-definition.

Harris is fluent in a kind of baby talk very different from the demented babble of the Republican assaults on her. She does not run from the politicization of her body—she embraces it. She is, in the way she tells her own story, a child of struggle. In her memoir, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey (2019), the earliest memory she recounts is of “a sea of legs moving about, of the energy and shouts and chants.” She gives us an infant’s-eye view of political activism, with her looking up from her stroller at the legs of fellow civil rights marchers. Her cutest baby anecdote is freighted with time and history: “My mother would laugh telling a story she loved about the time when I was fussing as a toddler. ‘What do you want?’ she asked, trying to soothe me. ‘Fweedom!’ I yelled back.”

In perhaps the only good moment in her primary campaign of 2019, Harris identified herself explicitly and indignantly as a Black child of the 1960s. She attacked Biden for his opposition to the policy of integrating school systems by busing pupils from Black families to white-dominated areas: “You know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public school, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.” Her campaign tweeted a picture of Harris as a little girl, her hair in pigtails tied with bows. It then produced T-shirts printed with this image and the words “THAT LITTLE GIRL WAS ME.” Childhood yarns are part of the grammar of American politics, but this one is different. It is more defiant than endearing, more confrontational than sentimental.

The image of a Black girl in pigtails has its own specific history. In 1954, just months after the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that found educational segregation to be unconstitutional, Scientific American published an article titled “The Biology of the Negro.” It was written by Curt Stern, an influential geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley—the same university to which Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, had traveled from India to study nutrition and endocrinology. It followed a lecture Stern had delivered in 1946 under the title “Why Do People Differ?” According to the historian of medicine Michael Yudell:

The program for the lecture pictured a cartoon with three girls, two of whom were white, one black. The local chapter of the NAACP objected to the picture of a shabbily dressed black girl in pigtails wearing boots flanked by two well-dressed white girls looking at the black girl and smiling.

But in 1964, just months before Harris was born, Look magazine published what became a famous painting by Norman Rockwell called The Problem We All Live With. It shows another little Black girl in pigtails, this time neatly dressed in all-white clothes that emphasize the color of her skin. She is six-year-old Ruby Bridges, walking determinedly to her first day at William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans in 1960. Towering over her, so high that their faces are out of the frame, are four men identified by their yellow armbands as deputy US marshals. Behind Bridges is a wall splattered with the bloodred juice of a hurled tomato and graffitied in bold letters with the N-word. By inviting his viewers to see this painting as a reality “we all” live with, Rockwell was saying this violence is every bit as American as his supposedly nostalgic images of a vanishing small-town way of life.

When Harris produced her THAT LITTLE GIRL WAS ME T-shirts, she was invoking her own history as well as the image of Ruby Bridges. And what’s striking about this is that “a Norman Rockwell view of America” is proverbial shorthand for a sanitized and sentimentalized version of the past. According to Bob Woodward’s Fear (2018), Trump’s economic adviser Gary Cohn made this very accusation against the then president in a heated argument over the nature of contemporary America: “‘Mr. President,’ Cohn said, trying to summarize, ‘You have a Norman Rockwell view of America.’” Harris, to the contrary, evokes a very different “Norman Rockwell view of America,” one in which racial violence and resistance are acknowledged as part of a shared reality.

The creation of “that little girl” involved the making of a profound choice about American history—and about its most toxic aspect: slavery. Of all the “firsts” that Harris represents—first female vice-president, first Black woman and first Indian American to contest the presidency—the one that goes unspoken is that if she wins in November, she will be the first openly acknowledged descendant of slaves to lead America. In this identification there is a complex interplay between freedom and necessity. It can perhaps best be appreciated through the uncanny recurrence of the same Irish name in her genealogy and in Biden’s: Finnegan or Finegan. It is Biden’s mother’s surname and a constant point of reference in his idea of who he really is. It lives on in the name of his granddaughter Finnegan. It is also the name of Harris’s father’s maternal grandmother, Miss Iris, a Black woman born, as he recalled in a 2020 essay, “Iris Finegan.”

Harris’s parents split up when she was five, and her father subsequently had a limited place in her life. Donald Harris, a leftist critic of orthodox theories of underdevelopment, became the first Black scholar to receive tenure in Stanford’s economics department. He wrote of Kamala and her sister, Maya, that “my one big regret is that they did not come to know very well the two most influential women in my life,” Miss Iris and his other grandmother, Miss Chrishy. Donald reproduced with his essay a photograph of Miss Iris with a two-year-old Kamala on her knee. He recalled how

we drove up to Thatch Walk and worked our way, with lots of cuts and bruises, through the same cane fields where Miss Iris had run a thriving business in the “good ole days” of sugar and, a long time before, had probably been part of a slave plantation.

This locates a potential American president in the fields where some of her ancestors were enslaved to the brutal task of cutting cane.

In this other history, a name like Finegan loses the meaning it has for Biden: a sense of continuity, an uncomplicated connection to a genetic heritage. These Irish ancestors cannot be assumed to be what they are to Biden—heroic underdogs. Miss Chrishy was born Christiana Brown, and Donald Harris believes her to be a “descendant of Hamilton Brown.” Hamilton Brown, who owned a large number of slaves in Jamaica and fiercely opposed abolition, was also Irish, born in County Antrim. But unlike John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Biden, and even Barack Obama, all of whom engaged in the public ritual of visiting Ireland to celebrate their ancestral roots, Harris would probably not want to celebrate her distant Finegan and Brown cousins.

This is because Blackness is seldom a free choice. Speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists at the end of July, Trump claimed that Harris suddenly “became a Black person” and had previously been identifying only with her Indian heritage. “Is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she became a Black person.” This was a lie—Harris has always identified as Black. But it also revealed a certain kind of truth about one of the ways racism operates: Trump’s attack on Harris was based on the assumption that she must be either Black or not Black.

It is easy for white Americans to pick an ethnicity—Biden could have decided to identify with his French or English, rather than his Irish, heritage. It is easy for white Americans to tell little lies about their ancestry. Trump himself has more than once falsely claimed that his father, Fred, who was born in New York, was in fact born in Germany: “My father is German, was German, born in a very wonderful place in Germany, so I have a very great feeling for Germany.” Fred Trump himself claimed for some years that he was Swedish. Harris, on the other hand, could not cherry-pick from among her complex origins. Her mother was indeed born in India and lived there until she was nineteen. Yet Gopalan understood that her girls were not going to be perceived in America as Brahmins. As Harris puts it in The Truths We Hold:

My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.

This is not a relishing of the openness of identity in America. It is something much more serious: an attempt to find the freedom within inevitability. Gopalan understood that her daughters could not escape the identity that a racist society would impose on them, including the history of enslavement that is part of their ancestry. What they could do is find the pride within that identity and embody the resistance that is the other side of that history.

They had to do this in an atmosphere of ferocious political engagement, in which these same questions of freedom and necessity were being hammered out within Black radicalism. Trump seeks to define Harris as a “radical left lunatic,” and there is no doubt that Republicans will delve into her parents’ political stances in the 1960s to find evidence for this characterization. But it is the exact opposite of the truth. The radical left is a huge influence on Harris—in the sense that she is part of a generational reaction against the revolutionary Black politics of the 1960s. She is a child of the revolution only in the sense that she grew up in its wreckage.

There is a figure in The Truths We Hold who is both named and not named, both intimately embraced and held at a distance. He is introduced as follows: Harris writes that San Francisco State University “had a student-run Experimental College, and in 1966, another of my mother’s dear friends, whom I knew as Uncle Aubrey, taught the college’s first-ever class in black studies.” We later learn that Aubrey’s aunt, Regina Shelton, was a “second mother” to Kamala and that “we shared a long-standing relationship of love, care, and connection” to this extended family. Uncle Aubrey is not given his full name, Aubrey LaBrie. Nor does Harris say much about his politics.

In 2019 Harris told Molly Ball of Time that she remembered coming “down the stairs of her childhood house in Berkeley to see FREE BOBBY carved in wet cement, after the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale was arrested.” Her childhood world was that from which the Panthers emerged. In 1965 LaBrie, along with his brothers Huey and Abdul and other friends, founded a periodical called Black Dialogue. It was in part a cultural magazine, publishing stories, poems, and essays alongside graphic art by young Black painters. But it was also highly political, and Aubrey is listed as its “political editor,” presumably responsible for its ideological direction. Its first issue appeared in the aftermath of the murder of Malcolm X and is “proudly dedicated” to his memory as a “great leader and a greater MAN.”

It was also produced immediately after the brutal police assault on peaceful civil rights marchers at Selma. It seethes with both the passion and the anguish of uncertainty that so many young Black activists felt in the face of such loss and violence. It despairs of the possibilities of looking to the two spheres that Kamala Harris would go on to inhabit—the law and democratic politics—to win justice:

The Black Americans are nauseated by the practices of the White community that are, to them, mockingly meaningless, hypocritical, dishonest and essentially amoral. These young Black people have no faith in the Constitution and no respect for the White man’s law. Why should they? What has it done for them? The law is dispensed in a manner which makes it a great big atrocious lie. It is merely another weapon to use against them.

After the Watts riots in Los Angeles in August 1965, when South Central LA became a combat zone and thirty-four people died, Black Dialogue published a call to arms by Aubrey LaBrie’s younger brother Huey:

My beloved brothers and sisters of Watts, how proud we are of you. You who burned the city of angels and shook the crumbling white power structure…. The enemy called it a riot but we know that it was an insurrection. It was one battle in the “war of Armageddon” or the war between the black and white. The blacks who participated in the insurrection introduced an extremely effective tactic of igniting fires to local parasitical white business communities. They were not rioters or hoodlums, they were guerrillas.

There is an irony here. The “war of Armageddon,” as invoked in Black Dialogue, was almost certainly drawn from the preaching of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. But it now has no purchase on the American left or on mainstream Black politics. Where it does have a strong grip is on the dark imagination of Trumpism. The insurrectionist violence that Trump unleashed with the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was fed by the millenarian vision of a coming civil war, framed by many of its believers as a racial “war between the black and white.” The Republican Party has moved into the orbit of apocalyptic tribalism. If you want to see a figure who represents the most definitive movement out of that orbit, look at Harris.

Harris told Ball in 2019 that “the reality is that when you are the so-called minority you learn many languages, necessarily.” She did not mean literal languages but rather the languages of power. Harris entered the very arenas her mother’s friends and political allies had despaired of: the law, party politics, elective public office. She chose to believe what the previous generation could not—that justice can be achieved by working from inside the existing institutional structures. It is an act of faith that critics of her work as a prosecutor and attorney general in California do not believe to be justified in practice by the way she used her power. She sought to uphold some wrongful convictions, threatened to prosecute parents of habitually truant children (a policy that disproportionately affected people of color), and even appealed a federal court ruling that California’s death penalty is unconstitutional (in spite of her own complete repudiation of the death penalty). But her caution is not mere moderation or bland centrism. It comes from a complex personal and political navigation between the desire for freedom on the one side and the tight constraints of reality on the other.

That weighing of what is right against what is possible is the business of democracy, and Harris represents the way the left has accepted that difficult responsibility. American politics has ended up in a place where it is those on the right who want to burn everything down. They will do that, if they can, in the name of a phony American normality that excludes Harris and everyone who shares with her a complex identity. It is striking, therefore, that Harris’s candidacy has given Democrats permission to point out how “weird” the Republicans’ version of America really is. Walz put the word into circulation just days after Biden announced his departure from the national stage. In a punchy statement after Trump appeared on Fox News, the Harris campaign listed as one of the main takeaways: “Trump is old and quite weird?” The conjunction of these two qualities implies that what is truly strange is not just Trump’s chronological age but the anachronistic vision in which only white men who plant their seed in fertile women are authentic citizens and legitimate rulers. Against that weirdness, we have the real possibility of a president whose history is synchronized with American reality.

—August 20, 2024