After making innumerable inane comments about Vice President Kamala Harris’ race since she became the Democratic nominee — including suggesting that she “turned Black†recently to advance her political career — former President Donald Trump was asked during last week’s debate if he thought his opponent’s race or gender should be part of his platform.
He replied: “I don’t care what she is. I don’t care. ... I couldn’t care less. Whatever she wants to be is okay with me.â€
That’s the same sort of rhetoric that is still often heard about people who are LGBTQ — namely that they choose to be who they are.
Harris is a woman, not an object, as Trump’s “whatever†would imply. Furthermore, what she “wants to be†is similarly immaterial. Race-wise, she is a Black, Asian-American woman.
People are also reading…
Harris noted that race was being used to further divide us as a country. That’s true, but this is exactly why it needs to be discussed. A great many people’s opinions are often based on racial biases, even if unconsciously.
I was watching Ted Koppel on CBS Sunday Morning last week. He was at the Wisconsin State Fair and interviewed fairgoers about their reasons for supporting whichever candidate they favored. One woman said Harris is too liberal: “I’m a white woman. I couldn’t afford to go to college when I graduated from high school. But when I had children my husband and I worked and paid for them to go to college. Nobody repaid us for that.â€
The fact that she had to mention at the onset that she was a white woman reveals the underlying bias, implying that forgiving college loans was something done only for Black people.
More revealing, though, was her remark that she and her husband worked to pay for their children’s college. Being in a two-parent household where both work is a definite advantage. But if the only work a person was able to obtain had been legislatively limited by race, paying for a child’s college might be impossible.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the first time that racial discrimination (as well as discrimination based on color, sex, religion and place of origin) in employment became illegal. Before then, the experience of a Black person trying to work was different from that of a white person getting a job to send their child to college.
Imagine this scenario: A young woman freshly graduated from high school sees a help-wanted sign in a bank window for tellers. When she goes into the bank to apply she cannot even get an application because she is white. She can apply for a janitorial position that pays less than half of what a teller earns, but she cannot apply for any white-collar job. If she later marries, and her husband has similar employment restrictions, how do they pay or save for college if they are living month to month? A single parent would be doubly disadvantaged.
Before 1964, most Black people were not allowed to apply for anything other than menial jobs. This was exactly the reason for the seven-month protest in August 1963 at the Jefferson Bank and Trust in ºüÀêÊÓƵ. The bank refused to hire anyone Black for a white-collar job. The Congress of Racial Equality asked the parent bank to hire four black people in non-janitorial jobs. The reply was that there were ““ fit for such jobs.
During that time, there were Black people in clerical jobs in the government sector, but often the pay was paltry.
My father died when I was 9, after which we lived in a shared home where all four adults worked full-time. My mother worked as a clerk-typist for the Missouri Division of Family Services for 26 years until mandated retirement at age 70 in 1985. She never earned over $12,000 a year. Her older sisters retired at 62 and 80 from jobs as domestics, being paid $25 a day. Her brother-in-law worked as a forklift operator at the Volkswagen plant, earning enough to pay the rent, buy groceries, and cover his car expenses. There was no saving for college.
Of course, there were disenfranchised white folks too. But it’s a lot easier to pull yourself up if there are no racial restrictions on the types of jobs you can get.
Race should not be a factor in the election, but the former president likes to blow on the racial ember to keep the flames of distrust burning. He says he doesn’t care what Harris wants to be. President, that’s what.