On Saturday, August 12th Vice President Kamala Harris hosted a celebration of Hip-Hop’s 50th anniversary at the White House, with many of the music genre’s pioneers like Common, Mc Lyte, Jeezy and Roxanne Shante in attendance.
Now normally if anyone in political office took the time out to invite a bunch of legendary emcees to their home, and proudly pronounced “Hip-hop culture is American culture!” to a crowd of cheering fans – with tons of Black media present – that would very quickly be applauded as a moment “for the culture.”
Yet for some reason this time that wasn’t the response.
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When Hollywood Unlocked CEO, Jason Lee posted a playful 22-second clip of the Vice President dancing at the festivities, it quickly went viral with a lot of the keyboard warriors on Black Twitter roasting the 58-year-old for her dance moves instead of applauding her efforts to highlight a beautiful milestone.
And that’s when I started to ask myself, “Why are so many Black Americans determined to not give this woman a chance?”
I AM TOTALLY GAGGING AT KAMALA dancing to *Vivrant Thing* at her 50th Anniversary of Hip Hop party
— Renee (@PettyLupone) September 9, 2023pic.twitter.com/UX8AwfIyMl
How they tricked us…
I will admit that during the VP selection process I too found myself giving Harris the side-eye due to numerous outlets touting her as a “tough on crime” prosecutor determined to throw innocent Black and Brown men in jail.
Those sensational headlines were understandably off-putting especially during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement when most of us felt like, “You’re either with us or against us.” And the media seemed to constantly be reminding us that Harris was most definitely not with us.
But in the last few years, the facts have started to reveal that many of our concerns about her “top cop” past were exaggerated, and that we’d once again been bamboozled by the oldest trick in the book: divide and conquer.
The devil works hard, but the GOP’s white conservative propaganda machine works even harder. And it is now my belief that they very cleverly convinced us to cannibilize one of our own under the guise of intelligent critique.
If you’re skeptical reading this, I understand, but let’s just take emotion out of it for a second and look at the facts.
When it comes to serving the Black community specifically, since being in office, the Biden/Harris administration has:
- Invested over $7 BILLION in America’s HBCUs
- Gotten Black unemployment down to near record lows
- Reduced the Black child poverty rate by more than 12%
- Created more than 13.4 million jobs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic
- Reversed decades of infrastructure disinvestment in communities of color, including investing $4 billion to reconnect communities to economic opportunities
- Increased Black enrollment in healthcare.gov coverage by a whopping 49% from 2020 to 2022
- Made maternal mortality – which affects Black mothers 3x more than anyone else – a national priority; including expanding postpartum coverage through Medicaid from two months to twelve months, and increasing coverage from three states to 35 states.
- Expanded access to capital for minority-owned small businesses, with over $12 billion for community lenders.
And this is just a small taste of what I was able to find. The list of strides that this administration has made focused squarely on improving the lives of Black Americans is actually pretty extensive; with many, if not most of those initiatives being spearheaded by Harris herself.
However, for some strange reason much of this isn’t being reported on the news. Instead, the rhetoric that we keep hearing is that she is hiding away somewhere doing nothing, with folks being quick to ask “Where’s Kamala hiding?”
The answer to that question is she hasn’t been hiding at all and has just been busy working to save our Black asses.
Meanwhile, on the day former president Donald Trump was indicted, social media was full of Black people, particularly Black men, taking videos of themselves proudly stating they’d still vote for him if he was convicted. When many of these people were questioned in the comments sections as to why they felt such loyalty to Trump, they cited that they liked his bravado and that he was good for their wallets.
How is it, that all it took was some flagrantly problematic posturing, and about $1800 in stimulus checks for so many people in our community to see this racist white man who puts children in cages as a hero?
But when a Black woman spends years pumping literal billions of dollars back into our communities – in every sector from healthcare and small business to education and even the environment – we still find ourselves rolling our eyes at her and cracking jokes about how much rhythm she has in her two-step?
I hate to say it but the true “coon behavior” is coming more from the audience than from the podium. And I fear that when history objectively looks back at this chapter, it is US – the general public – that will be the ultimate butt of the joke; with scholars wondering why we were so determined not to support an administration that so clearly cares about the very issues we’ve always complained about.
Debunking the “top cop” myth
Back in June of this year, an NBC news poll reportedly found that Harris had the lowest approval rating of any Vice President in history. A suspicious honor given that people like Mike Pence and Dick Chaney – who both have about as much charm and grace as a Disney super villain – once held this office.
What this stunning statistic underscores is how deeply both racial bias and misogyny are ingrained in all of our subconscious minds, which then makes us harbor an illogical fear of women in high positions of power.
In fact, the hateful rhetoric that the GOP has spoon-fed the Black community about Harris has been brillaint in that it hinges mostly on our collective disdain for any “siddity Black woman” who seemingly seeks to emasculate “poor Black men” who just can’t catch a break.
Harris being the first woman and the first Black attorney general in the history of California is an objectively impressive feat, but before we could even clap and yell “Yasss Queen” like we normally would, the stats for how many Black men she convicted were very specifically highlighted in the media to stoke the flames of gender wars and paint her as a man-hater.
But what many failed to realize during that slander campaign against her is that when Harris ran for public office in 2003 we were all just coming out of the “you gotta be TOUGH on crime” era of the 80s and 90s. Back then every politician in the country had to move like that to to get elected because public sentiments were focused on championing tough justice. Even if you were a Democrat.
No one in politics – not even Joe Biden and our Forever President Barack Obama – has a record from that era that could pass the 2020s “woke test.” Yet we forgave both Joe Biden and Obama enough for their former sins to elect them to the very top office in the land, based on just a promise of improved behavior.
Yet here it is several years into Harris’ first term as VP, after she helped appoint more Black judges to the Federal appellate courts than any administration in history, and more Black women to the Federal appellate courts than all Administrations combined. After she teamed up with Corey Booker and was at the forefront of getting the anti-lynching bill passed. After she and Biden took a stance against gun violence and successfully enacted the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which is the first significant piece of federal gun safety legislation in three decades.
Even after she spoke at the funeral of Tyre Nichols, a Black man who was fatally beaten by police officers in Memphis, Tenn. And then on the 50th anniversary of Hip Hop threw the literal “cookout” that we all have joked for generations about wanting to be invited to, and actually invited us….
After ALL of that, some of you still refuse to give sis a chance.
So riddle me this family: what do you call it when a Black woman does ten times more than her male counterparts to make things right and still only gets a fraction of the grace?
While you ponder on the very obvious answer to that question, I’m gonna grab my purse and officially hop off the Kamala hate train, because it’s now become apparent that it’s full of hypocrites and most likely headed nowhere I need to be.
Holding elected officials accountable is our civic duty. Yet the way Harris has been handled these last few years isn’t just about accountability. It also highlights how our community has historically held Black leaders – especially Black women leaders – up to unrealistic standards that only set them up to be further undermined by the system.
Even if you aren’t the biggest fan of the Biden/Harris administration, I think we can all agree there’s too much on the line in this upcoming election for us to keep working against our own best interests. A little bit of grace can go a long way.
Blue Telusma is a columnist whose viral think pieces have been featured on CNN, HuffPost, Buzzfeed, USA Today, BET, and several other national news outlets. She served as a senior writer at theGrio for almost a decade and her work mainly focuses on dissecting pop culture, promoting emotional intelligence, and fostering activism through the arts.
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