"Black Excellence" Failed Us Again

The Harris announcement — and the reaction to it — reveal the fallacy of representational politics. Shared identity is not shared beliefs.

Credit: Gage Skidmore

The Black elite is obsessed with convincing people that pageantry is progress. The charade is once again set to reach the oval office. Last week, Joe Biden announced that he had selected Kamala Harris to be his Vice Presidential nominee in the upcoming Presidential election. 

Biden’s decision wasn’t surprising. The 77-year-old democrat was the VP for Barack Obama, the first Black President. For some, his proximity to Obama overshadows his porous record on criminal justice. Now, Biden’s seeking to rekindle that dynamic by potentially introducing the first Black (and South Asian) woman into the White House. 

It appears that the Democratic party’s national brain trust only knows how to communicate with Black people via celebrity and symbolism. Barack Obama had a paltry response to police brutality and a predatory immigration policy (which is a Black issue), but he had plenty of rapper friends. In 2016, Hillary Clinton trotted out Jay-Z, Beyonce, and other rappers to appeal to Black voters. In June, after George Floyd was killed and the people took to the streets in demonstration, Democrats knelt in kente cloth and co-opted Black Lives Matter — without addressing the organization’s agenda. 

Kamala Harris’ VP nomination is another gesture of hollow solidarity. She helped destroy an incalculable amount of Black lives as a California Prosecutor, but a slew of Black entertainers, journalists, entrepreneurs, and other prominent figures are seeking to convince us that we should still celebrate her because she’s Black. They once again opted to choose proximity to the establishment over the low-and-middle class Black people who gave them their fame and fortune.

The Harris announcement — and the reaction to it — reveal the fallacy of both representational politics and “Black excellence.” Black people are calling for politicians to defund the police, and instead received a ticket of unabashed carceral advocates. Harris’ Blackness isn’t inherent solidarity. But the Black elite who’ve benefitted from that lie are on the job of convincing Black voters otherwise.

Days before the VP pick was made public, over 100 prominent Black men signed a letter asking Biden to select a Black woman as his running mate because "failing to select a Black woman in 2020 means you will lose the election." Their demand follows an open letter from over 700 Black women noting that “In politics, we have carried so many on our backs across the finish line, and in this moment in our history, we believe that it is time for a Black woman.” 

The male list included a hodgepodge of prominent Black men, including Van Jones, Michael Eric Dyson, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Charlamagne Tha God, as well Timbaland and Cedric The Entertainer. The interspersing of intellectuals, political analysts, and entertainers exhibit the level to which neoliberalism, consumerism, and celebrity have converged in the 21st century. 

Nelly and Ludacris have been on CNN airing their views on police brutality right along with Dyson and Jones. With that even playing field, it’s easy to see why entertainers feel like their political endorsements should hold weight. But while it’s simple enough to convince fans to support a Black-owned brand or advocate for Black representation at award shows, that simple one-to-one logic spells disaster in the political world. Pageantry can’t trump policy. 

"For too long Black women have been asked to do everything from rally the troops to risk their lives for the Democratic Party with no acknowledgment, no respect, no visibility, and certainly not enough support," the letter said, echoing the letter from Black women. That’s true, but that lack of support reflects deep-rooted misogyny that won’t change from Harris’ presence in the White House. Did Barack Obama’s Presidency have any bearing on Black people facing bias in the job and housing markets, or how they were perceived by predatory cops?

The letter also attempted to defend Kamala Harris by asking whether Biden has been asked to atone for his contributions fo the 1994 Crime Bill. Again, they identified a double-standard, but their dissonance is astounding. Acknowledging the criticisms against Kamala’s record means admitting that she’s a carceral ambassador, but ultimately concluding that it doesn’t matter as much as having a Black person in office. They’ve ascribed their Black Capitalist ethos to politics and surmised that as long as it’s a Black face doing the predation, it’s a moment of excellence.

It’s curious to see that the letter concludes that they “don’t want to choose between the lesser of two evils’ and “don’t want to vote for the devil we know,” when that scenario is exactly what their advocacy has influenced. Tellingly, the letter fixates on what a Black woman nomination will mean for the democratic party, but doesn’t reference the rest of Black America. It’s worth wondering how much these people actually care about Black America after these letters and their toothless response to June’s uprising. They’ll maintain their financial security regardless of who’s in office — but having a Black person there gives them profile-boosting proximity.  

Kamala Harris’ political track record is diametrically opposed to Black liberation. The Black elite wants us to believe that her potential VP appointment is a good development for Black women. The same Black women who she laughed about prosecuting for their children’s’ school truancy? She’s touted herself as a “progressive prosecutor,” an oxymoron, but consider her actions as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general: the Washington Examiner reported that she “failed to inform defense attorneys about criminal and professional misconduct records that raised questions about the credibility of government witnesses” which resulted in a dismissal of 1,000 cases and a 2010 Supreme Court ruling that she breached due process rights. She beamed about the following stats on her website in 2008:

• Raised the overall felony conviction rate from 52% in 2003 to 67% in 2006, the highest in a decade.

• Raised the felony conviction rate at trial from 62% in 2003 to 80% in 2006.

• Sent 40% more serious and violent offenders to State Prison.

• Strengthened the Homicide Unit, reduced the backlog of homicide cases and, handling homicides aggressively, charged 87% of all homicide cases brought by police.

• Secured an 85% conviction rate for homicides.

• Increased convictions of drug dealers from 56% in 2003 to 74% in 2006.

Harris sustained California’s “Three Strikes Law,“ which disproportionately affects Black people. in 2015, she refused to endorse a 2015 bill calling for a special prosecutor to investigate deadly police shootings. She was also a vocal opponent of Prop K, which vied to decriminalize sex work. 

Kevin Cooper is a Black man on death row for a 1983 quadruple murder that multiple judges believe he was framed for. Harris could have ordered DNA testing that would have likely exonerated him but refused to. George Gage has a life sentence in California after being accused of sex crimes, but his trial judge concluded that the evidence against him was unreliable, and the victim’s mother called her a “pathological trial.” In spite of the evidence that Gage could be innocent, Harris also refused to give him a new trial. Daniel Larsen had his 28-to-life gun conviction overturned by a judge, but Harris appealed the release, not because she believed he was guilty, but ”because he failed to raise his legal arguments in a timely fashion.” Thus, Larsen served another two years before being released in 2013. 

She’s tough on crime, but curiously, she protected Catholic pedophiles, protected corrupt prosecutors as California Attorney General, and oversaw an SFPD that looked the other way on the misdeeds of their informants. It’s not a matter of Harris being a decent person in a tough position, like some Defense Attorneys and Prosecutors may be. She has a record of being a corrupt, predacious “top cop,” — but apparently we’re supposed to be happy because she’s a Black one.

The ease in which her advocates can sidestep her wrongs underscores our collective apathy toward her victims: the incarcerated population. Harris supporters offer platitudes about crime and punishment or downplay injustices like the Cooper or Gage cases, but they reflect a dehumanizing perspective of people who are incarcerated. Imagine being Cooper, facing death for something you may not have done, and living with the reality that Harris refused to extend you a helping hand for no good reason. Imagine seeing segments of Black America ignore your living hell to extol her simply because of her ethnicity. Should he feel any solidarity with the Black community?

There’s little surprise that these entertainers, politicians, and upper-middle-class Blacks can look the other way on her criminal justice record; they’re the same people in bed with corporations that benefit from mass incarceration. For years, they’ve succeeded at the literal expense of the people, making us feel like feeding their bank accounts meant the prosperity of the entire race. Now they’re trying to sway the Black constituency into believing that voting for the latest “lesser evil” will bring us around the corner from liberation. In April, Diddy opined that Black people should hold their vote “until one of the two party’s representatives makes a valid agreement with African Americans.” He noted, “the Black vote is not gonna be for free.” Apparently, the fee was illusory representation. But how much is that worth?

Representation, as the Black elite present it, is a sham. Shared identity is not shared beliefs. Shared identity is not shared regard for each other’s humanity. Pigment alone isn’t enough to overshadow the suffering that Harris has caused thousands of incarcerated Black people and the families who reckon with their absence. What kind of self-esteem boost is it that Black women can now be imperialists too? How much solidarity could be felt with a woman who spent decades feeding a system that destroyed the Black community? Harris is on record noting that, “I’m not gonna do something that’s only gonna benefit Black people.” She doesn’t even believe in solidarity over policy, so why should we?

This moment has to be the death knell for representational politics. The Black upper class, and elite, chose empty representation over the people, again showing us how they feel about us. They choose the illusion of comfort over whatever sacrifice would have been incurred by refusing to do the Democratic party’s bidding and being honest about Harris’ inhumanity. If they wanted to vote for Biden just to get Trump out of office, that’s fine. But their gall to spin Harris’ appointment as a crowning achievement instead of a failure of an ineffective system is a spit in the face to all the people she aggrieved — and us. 

The Democratic party has long known that Black people are going to vote for them regardless, and offer us the lowest hanging fruit in the name of placation. They offered someone who’s agenda will stand in the way of Black liberation, and attempted to frame it as a moment of Black liberation. Still, Black people are eating it up, creating images likening Kamala to freedom fighters like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. Democrats are disingenuous. And based on how they, they’re scared of actual progress. 

There are no wins in this system. American democracy is a plodding tanker, smearing over human rights, poor people, immigrants, and so much more in the sustenance of capitalism. Their soldiers, the Black elite, feign solidarity while setting us up to be flattened next. Now, more than ever, it’s time to stop falling for the charade of representational politics and consider the work necessary to enact actual change for poor people. 

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