Within hours of Vice President Kamala Harris emerging as the likely Democrat nominee for November’s election, the misogyny and racism ramped up.
It happened via intentional mispronunciations of her name and jokes about her laugh – by Donald Trump himself, a former president and 2024 presidential candidate.
But it gets darker across social media, where Kamala Harris has been described as a “witch” (familiar terminology for Australians considering the experience of our first female prime minister) among various other terms, including unoriginal accusations she’d “slept her way to the top”. The diehard MAGA enthusiasts have also been sampling various derogatory and sexualised names across social media. A doctored and completely false image emerged of Harris standing next to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The ABC aired footage on Four Corners on Monday night featuring a Trump supporter selling T-shirts with slogans reading, “Biden blows and Harris swallows”.
ABC News Verify, meanwhile, has been tracking some of the racist and sexist tropes and found a flurry of activity around the term DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) in relation to Harris on X, with posts suggesting she was endorsed by Biden only because of her ethnicity and gender. A former Trump aide was on British news channel GB and subsequently cutoff for his language after he said, “this woman, this disaster whose only qualification is having a vagina and the right skin colour…”
It’s both subtle and overt forms of racism and misogyny that is, sadly, to be expected in this campaign.
But no matter how noisy or public such language is and becomes, we can never allow it to be normalised in our public debates and even conversations regarding leadership appointments in business and elsewhere.
The sexism and racism Harris is experiencing is also nothing new. A 2021 study of 13 female qualifications over a two month period before the 2020 presidential election found three quarters of abusive content targeted Harris, who was then running for VP alongside Biden’s presidential push.
But given how divisive this 2024 campaign has become and what Trump and other prominent people have already “normalised” in their language, expect more racist and sexist abuse thrown at Harris, more misinformation and more claims that she is a “diversity hire”.
It will ramp up in the desperation, against a backdrop of a highly experienced woman quickly bringing Democrats behind her – raising a record-smashing US$81 million in the first 24 hours of her campaign, the biggest fundraising day of the 2024 election cycle.
Within hours of Biden stepping down, an estimated 90,000 Black women and allies joined a Zoom call to support her presidential campaign (a Zoom executive had to step in to increase the platform’s capacity to 40,000 after it maxed out at 1000 participants with an additional 50,000 joining across different platforms). More than 53,000 people registered for a separate “Black Men for Harris” call.
And already, the “diversity hire” angles have slipped into the Australian media.
Today, a column in The Australian declares Harris’ rise comes down to “Democrats Diversity Dogma”, noting “The Democrats face an exquisite diversity, equity and inclusion dilemma of their own making. They will have to pick a woman of colour, Kamala Harris, as their presidential candidate 2.0.”
Imagine, having to pick a woman of colour! One with 12 years of prosecution experience, Senate experience, Attorney-General experience overseeing the largest state justice department in the country and a term as VP, among other things.
The Republicans are dealing with their own “diversity dogma” – one that’s focused on men, aims to limit women’s reproductive rights, and wasn’t helped by Trump’s own VP pick, J.D Vance.
The Republican Convention was very much a “man’s world. They even had the soundtrack to back it up, with the classic It’s a man’s world by James Brown played as Trump stepped on stage, in case the previous speeches — including Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt to display a Trump/Vance logo across his chest — didn’t make the “man’s world” Republican reality clear enough.
This Republican man’s world was further cemented around the tech bros present at the convention, the chants to “fight, fight, fight” referencing what Trump said as he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in the days leading up to the convention and also the fact men are significantly more interested in voting for Trump than women.
The next step for this “man’s world” looks set to involve Trump taking on a woman on the debate stage. He has declared today that he will “absolutely” debate Harris. We look forward to it.