I FIND MYSELF thinking about the significance of “firsts,” the role of faith in the morality of the nation, and the place of race and gender in that project. Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascent to one of the highest seats of political power is historic, unprecedented, and awe-inspiring. Like Barack Obama before her, it is a first that has ushered in, for many, a renewed faith in the nation. Multiply the emotional impact of that first by whatever number captures the firestorm of the past four years, and that faith easily transforms into a belief that “morality” has been secured and that things are going to be, basically, okay.
This train of thought is, I believe, dangerous and wrong. I do not discount the feelings Harris evokes. The emotional impact of Harris’ election registers for me very personally as a Black woman. When I initially heard that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had won the election, my first thought was exhilarated shock at Trump’s defeat. Then, as that fact sunk in, I realized that this outcome meant the election of a woman of color—a Black woman, a woman of South Asian descent—to the vice presidency of the United States. Weeks later, the words still seemed somewhat strange, as if my brain was having trouble wrapping itself around the reality. My inability to readily speak her new position reflects to me the depth of her significance, and the change it portends for how I and future generations of Black and brown girls and women will be able to envision and speak of ourselves. I pause, however, at the unexamined triumphal connections being made between Harris, morality, and political futures.
We need to problematize the narrative of Black success, women’s success, and Black women’s success as the proving of American virtue and redemption. We also need to think critically about our articles of “faith” in the nation and our general interpretations of the moral tilt of the universe hinging on American “success” (however that is defined).
Harris is making history at the same time that multiple pandemics—COVID-19, white supremacy, and misogyny, to name a few—are raging. I don’t think this is an accident, nor do I think it is simply backlash. Many people have spoken about the capacity of institutions to incorporate critique into their functioning—to assimilate and co-opt it, instead of being transformed by it. Angela Davis writes in Abolition Democracy that the inclusion of people of color into positions of influence within oppressive systems does not necessarily undermine those systems, but often strengthens them.
Our very frameworks of race, gender, and moral overcoming—of “firsts”—have similarly been largely formed inside of, rather than in opposition to, dominant systems. They can elaborate a shortsighted definition of success whose selective, limited horizons enable American ills, at home and abroad.
If we move forward with anything from this unprecedented historic moment, let it be with a renewed belief in the need for moral clarity—and hope that it will come.
Jeania Ree V. Moore is a writer, United Methodist deacon, and doctoral student in religious studies and African American studies at Yale University.
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