A moment of obligatory seriousness about candidate Harris. First of all, I don’t like her because I find her to be borderline incompetent as a politician. She doesn’t have rizz. Everything about her presentation is wooden and she doesn’t give me the impression that she could work any room worth working. Just like some women simply cannot walk properly in high heeled shoes, much less dance in them, she’s just awkward in every way. Moreover, she cannot think on her feet with grace, which underscores what’s tone deaf about her in response to criticism of her actual career. You want to give her a chance to speak and you feel like, man she’s a good looking actress, but the script here is awful. Plus, she can’t ad lib her way through a B Movie.
However, we live an an era of performance poetry and as you can demonstrably see in every news cycle, her handlers are among the best spin doctors the planet has ever seen. Weekend at Bernie’s clever. Masters of disguise. Experts at manipulation of opinion and mass distributors of non-sequiturs. Of course one of the tools they have recently mastered is the boogaloo shuffle. What’s that? Let me explain.
Having just invented the term because I don’t need to find the scholarly appropriate terminology for race fuckery, I know it when I smell it. Here’s what you need to know. Harris is going to have a built-in racial affinity demographic. And since ‘urban’ means black and Hispanic (‘black’ is always first) and since blackness always incorporates the 15th century One Drop Rule, Kamala Harris is black. She’s as black as anybody who believes blackness is a thing can possibly be black, which is to say it’s rather arbitrary until you attach enough negative stereotypes.
Is she incompetent? Hmm. That’s negative, so it must make her more black.
Does she dance? Hmm. That’s positive. But that makes her more black.
OK wait. I’m pulling these out of my ass. Let’s check Facebook. Meh. Nothing today. Plus it’s very annoying to look in Facebook for mentions of Harris when I have toilets I could be scrubbing in my own house. Why don’t we just leave it at this?
It’s difficult for me to accept this video as evidence, knowing it is a partly product of political activism, but then again, that’s the arena Harris has engaged. It is fair that she should be judged by the populist standards of our unprincipled pop era. Who can tell me with a straight face that Equity is not a black thing, by and for those who have worked the ‘minority’ angle of The Struggle? There’s only one exception that makes sense, which is that it’s garden variety communism. Were we having a more principled discussion in politics such things would be even more clear than they are: Communism has no respect for individual rights. Nor does racism. So how do we deal with a candidate who expects pork based on the intersectional grievance narrative? How is this person even run for President which such contempt for individuality?
Well, the one who can be Jamaican and Indian and therefore black. The one who loves to speak about an ahistorical, postmodern future ‘unburdened by what has been’. Why is this race fuckery? Because it requires us to accept that Harris is a new kind of creature with an inherent ability to know what is right for the Wretched of the Earth and it is therefore in one’s racial self-interest (as a ‘minority’) to cast your vote for such a creature. It stands to the same twisted reason that her opponent is essentially a racist, colonizer, bent on violent hegemony. And there go my steelmanning skills. Sorry. I’m too busy retching.
The foils making the rounds are Project 2025, which nobody has the patience to read, least of all me. After all, I see myself as on the verge of becoming a rich tech bro of the graybeard variety. Keyboard fingers crossed. I believe whatever Heritage produces is mainstream Reaganite. If it’s not, then they’re not conservative. I don’t have much time or patience for the entirety of some think tank’s strategy being reduced to ‘anti-black’.
Speaking of which. Some players of race games are doing a double reverse on Harris, which of course is unfair to her, whether or not she herself chooses to identify as black. That gambit is, of course, categorizing her prosecutorial record as one that is particularly ‘anti-black’. Such convicts, including one who Harris watchers have generally accepted as innocent of all charges, have been paraded on X/Twitter this week.
And yet one page of doomscrolling X/Twitter is making me ill. On the one hand it is claimed that she used prison labor (or kids in camps) to knit her a rainbow vest for Pride Week. In another she pardons serial criminals who commit more crimes upon release. In yet another she wants felons to vote. Damned hard to parse if all are close to fact. Then again, just watch her dance. She’s popular and that’s what matters.
It doesn’t matter what color Harris is, and people should not take whatever color she is supposed to represent as representative of her career or her potential. To the extent that we give weight to that, we poison our own democracy with arbitrary proxies of interest. The bigger scandal of course is the machinations of the Parties in their manipulations of fact in their presentations and characterizations of the candidate. Matters of actual policy are buried. I have a difficult time believing that Harris is much more than a DEI placeholder, and she hasn’t been held to much of a standard at all during her four year reign. Is that because she’s incompetent or because her party is systemically racist? Hmmm.