Kamala Harris

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      in US Politics

      Why are politicians suddenly talking about their 'lived experience'? | Kwame Anthony Appiah

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      Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris told a TV interviewer the other day that she had promised Joe Biden that she would always share with him her “lived experience, as it relates to any issue that we confront”. That sounded comforting, but should it? This expression has a fairly standard application among qualitative sociologists, where it comes up in work that explores individual subjectivity. How to record and communicate “lived experience” has been a topic of earnest professional debate, sometimes involving appeals to the philosophical traditions of phenomenology. Yet the future vice-president assuredly wasn’t promising a former vice-president to deliver the results of a technical sociological method applied to her own case.
      Needless to say, the expression has, over the past decade or so, escaped the academy and assumed a somewhat different set of meanings. At first, it tended to designate firsthand experiences that were specific to women, minorities and other vulnerable groups. During last year’s Democratic primaries in the United States, one supporter of Julián Castro (who served in Barack Obama’s cabinet) was quoted saying: “It is important to have somebody who has the lived experience of being a brown person in this country on that stage – a dark-skinned Latino man.” Yet semantic sprawl had already set in; it turns out that “ordinary people” could be in possession of lived experience, too. Elizabeth Warren, before her run in the primaries, said that politicians such asBarack Obama, being overly impressed with hopeful economic statistics, were blind to “the lived experiences of most Americans”. Pete Buttigieg, another contender, remarked that when Democrats were over-focused on Trump-bashing, “it didn’t seem like we were talking about the lived experience of Americans”. If you were the sort of person who felt estranged from the coastal elites, it emerged, you, too, might have lived experience.
      And what made the phrase so powerful was the unappealable authority it seemed to represent. As Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, that most American of poems, “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” You can debate my sociopolitical analyses – those facts and interpretations are shared and public – but not my lived experience. Lived experience isn’t something you argue, it’s something you have.
      Yet if lived experience was once viewed as a way to speak truth to power, power has learned to speak “lived experience” with remarkable fluency. Consider what happened when, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, Senate Republicans set out to counter a Democratic bill for police reform with a milder proposal of their own, one backed by Senator Tim Scott, from South Carolina. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, declared: “It’s a straightforward plan based on facts, on data and lived experience” – the lived experience evidently supplied by Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate. Somehow the lived experience of Cory Booker, the black senator who introduced a Democratic police reform bill, offered different lessons.
      Experience, alas, is never unmediated and self-interpreting. Ideology, though it can be shaped by experience, also shapes our experiences. The twins Shelby Steele and Claude Steele – a former professor of English and a professor of psychology – draw on their lived experience to produce opposite pictures of the black American condition. Claude has emphasised the detrimental effects of racial stereotypes; Shelby sees the real threat in efforts, such as affirmative action, to remedy racial disparities. Justice Clarence Thomas, a black conservative, draws from his lived experience to confirm a bootstrapping position (If I can make it, so can you), just as the late Congressman John Lewis, hero of the civil rights left, could do so to confirm the need for social intervention (I almost didn’t make it). There’s no guarantee what message people will take from their experience: no guarantee that we’ll all be singing the Song of Myself in the same key.
      When we’re thinking about policy, then, how much weight should we give to private experience? Pressed to explain what she had in mind, Harris listed some elements of her biography: growing up a black child in the US, serving as a prosecutor, having a mother who was a teenage immigrant from India. There’s no doubt, of course, that these are the sorts of experiences from which a person could learn a great deal. And stories drawn from our own experience can be powerful ways of recounting what we have learned. But identities are too multiple and complex to allow any individual’s experience to count as truly representative.
      Take being black. Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an immigrant because she was studying at Berkeley, and she went on to be a university professor at McGill in Canada. Her father, born in Jamaica, is an emeritus economics professor from Stanford. Harris has doubtless experienced racial discrimination: in the US, that’s almost guaranteed for a person from an ethnic minority who spends any time out of the house. But her upper-middle-class upbringing, not to mention the fact that she spent five years of her teens in Canada, means that being black has affected her differently than it would someone who came from a background of modest education and means.
      The point isn’t that being middle class means you’re not an “authentic” black person. It’s that, as with all of us, her experience has been particular. People who have served as prosecutors will be found on the left, the centre, and the right. And the children of some Indian immigrants to the US will have voted enthusiastically for Donald Trump. There isn’t a black experience, shared by all black people, or an Indian immigrant experience, shared by the children of immigrants from India, or even a prosecutor’s experience, shared by all prosecutors.
      What makes the invocation of lived experience such a powerful move – the fact that it’s essentially private, removed from inspection – is exactly what makes it such a perilous one. No doubt a story about an injustice you’ve experienced, or a positive story about a state school or a public hospital, may be more powerful than some abstract evocation of equality. Still, people across the ideological spectrum will have their own perceptions of injustice, their own stories of public-sector success or failure. And so I hope the vice-president-elect will offer, alongside her lived experience, her considered judgment. We go wrong when we treat personal history as revelation, to be elevated above facts and reflection. Talk of lived experience should be used not to end conversation but to begin them.
      Kwame Anthony Appiah is professor of philosophy and law at New York University and author of In My Father’s House More

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      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris didn't become vice-president-elect by saying 'no worries if not' | Emma Brockes

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      Every few months on social media, a campaign reliably comes around urging women to stop undermining ourselves at work. Don’t, we’re advised, use the qualifier “just”, as in “can I just float an idea?” Stop apologising for making routine demands or having the temerity to use up someone’s time. Most recently and trenchantly, don’t, we are advised, ground every timorous request with the phrase “no worries if not”.
      I say and do all of these things, although less frequently than I once did. Where 10 years ago the qualifiers came out as reflex, these days, I generally catch and delete them before I hit send. I don’t open emails with “sorry to bother you”, unless I’m being deliberately passive aggressive. (This is my preferred tonal mode, obviously, although it gets me nowhere in the US. A snippy email I sent to an American last week hinged on the word “unideal”, a neutral term to American ears, but to a Brit, clearly, signifying a curse on you and your family for a thousand years.)
      These exhortations to pull ourselves together and stop vacillating have been a useful alert to behaviours many women engage in at the level of instinct. These behaviours are also strategic, a necessary hedge to what we know is the offputting effect of women making demands. The “no worries if not” habit is a particularly hard one to break, based as it is on a justifiable anxiety that the only way to get what you want is to present it as an act of largesse on the part of the person you are asking.
      All of which has been on my mind this week while watching the ascent of Kamala Harris to vice-president-elect. Although the relief and ecstasy at the election results were huge, when she made her victory speech on Saturday night, I didn’t expect to be moved. Harris wasn’t accepting the top job, after all: she was the warm-up act for Joe Biden and celebrating her “first” when the position was still second-in-command seemed to me a bit dismal. And yet, when she gave a shout-out to all the young girls watching, including my five-year-old daughters, urging them to see themselves in ways others might not traditionally have seen them, to my amazement I had to swallow hard and look away.
      Harris had, over the weeks and months of the campaign, been subject to a lot of the criticisms that dogged Hillary Clinton. She was too abrasive, too cocky, too full of herself. During the primaries, while Bernie Sanders and Biden shouted and chopped the air with their hands, Harris remained, by necessity, even-tempered and moderately spoken. A man who loses his temper is forceful; a woman who does so is unhinged.

      The soft-approach of “no worries if not” isn’t a self-defeating verbal tic, therefore, but has for a long time been the quickest and easiest way for women to deliver a frictionless result, and it is one it would be good to retire. I recently wrote a book with Megan Rapinoe, whose directness – with Donald Trump, with Sports Illustrated, with the governing body of her own sport – has been interpreted by some as monstrous impoliteness, about which Rapinoe doesn’t have a shred of self-doubt.
      Why, she says, shouldn’t she and her teammates demand more money, when they win all the time and are, compared with male footballers in the US, chronically underpaid? Why shouldn’t she, while accepting an award from Sports Illustrated, flag up how few women and writers of colour they employ? And why shouldn’t she say, after winning, “I deserve this”?
      All of which I understand intellectually, but still find basically socially mortifying. In the writing of this book, we had to go over it, again and again, and each time it struck me as freshly outlandish. How did she not die of embarrassment? Wasn’t she worried these kinds of statements made her appear “ungrateful”? Where did she get the gumption to presume she might take up that much space? “I think about the people I’m speaking for, not those I’m speaking to,” she said, which is a useful reframing. And in a phrase that could serve, admirably, as the title for a book of whimsical essays on female confidence, “I don’t need you to like me to know that I’m right.”
      Neither the confidence thing, nor the perception of women asking for things as rude, will be solved quickly, and to that extent “no worries if not” remains a useful approach. But with a woman in the second highest office in the land, it would be nice if a shift got under way: from help me out here, I’m grateful for any bone you might throw me, to help me out here because it’s your job.
      • Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York. She is the author of One Life, by Megan Rapinoe More

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      in US Politics

      'Great expectations': how world leaders reacted to Biden and Harris's election win – video

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      Most world leaders rushed to congratulate Joe Biden on his election on Twitter, and spoke of ‘hope’ and ‘expectation’ in later statements.
      Biden’s key foreign policy priorities are cooperation in the fight against coronavirus, a commitment to rejoin the UN Paris climate agreement and, more broadly, to promise a change in tone toward traditional US allies. 
      Russia and China are yet to congratulate the president-elect, as the outgoing president, Donald Trump, is yet to concede defeat
      Russia and China silence speaks volumes as leaders congratulate Biden More

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      With Donald Trump gone, Brexit Britain will be very lonely on the world stage | Afua Hirsch

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      After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, an American friend compared the nativist populism of the United States with the state of Brexit Britain. “You think it’s bad that Britain voted to leave the EU,” he told me. “America has voted to leave itself.”
      Four years later, things look a little different. Having indeed taken leave of its senses, America has now been rescued – not for the first time – by its citizens of colour. Polling data shows that without minority-ethnic voters, many of whom had to overcome deliberate and systemic attempts to suppress their participation – the nation’s constitutional and political integrity would have endured a further four years of Trump’s wrecking ball.
      Under cover of the past four years of regression, the British government has been running riot. However badly our leaders behaved, though, they knew there was a larger, more powerful democracy behaving even worse. Conservative attacks on the independence of the judiciary, for example, may represent an unprecedented assault on our constitution. But for Trump, lashing out personally at individual judges on Twitter became routine.
      The British government’s relaxed attitude about violating international law has prompted the condemnation of nearly all living former prime ministers. But Trump led the way in tearing up international agreements and withdrawing from multilateral organisations.
      And then there is race. In Britain we have had to endure an equalities minister who suggests anti-racism reading materials are illegal in school, a foreign minister who derided Black Lives Matter as a Game of Thrones spoof, and Boris Johnson himself, as ready to insult black children in Africa as he was the black president in the White House. Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris is said to “hate” Johnson for claiming Obama held a grudge against Britain because of his “part-Kenyan” heritage. The prime minister’s comments have not aged well.
      The Kenya reference was not accidental. Much of Johnson’s political strategy rests on foundations of imperial pride and colonial nostalgia. That was compatible with the “special relationship” when the American president was, like him, similarly smitten by an imagined great white past. Lamenting the decline of this relationship has become a national pastime in Britain – traditionally at just such moments as this, when a change of guard in the White House threatens the status quo. What is clear is that, insofar as the special relationship does exist, it’s rooted in “shared cultural values”. This phrase, whenever deployed by Britain, is almost always code for: “We colonised you once, and how well you’ve done from it.”

      But empires, inconveniently, have a habit of striking back. And so the victims of British colonial abuse in Ireland have, through a twist of fate, lent their ancestral memory to the new US president. When Joe Biden visited County Mayo in 2016, he heard how his home town experienced the worst of the potato famine – even by the catastrophic standards of the nation as a whole – the entire population “gone to workhouse, to England, to the grave”.
      Kamala Harris’s heritage gives her more in common with many British people than it does with most Americans. Her grandfather worked for the British colonial government in India, where he strived for independence from the white supremacist ideology of the British empire. The power behind this empire earlier pioneered the enslavement of Africans that led Harris’s father, Donald Harris, to be born in Jamaica.
      Tories pumped with pride from this same history – gloriously bragging in song that “Britons never shall be slaves” – are unlikely to find its seductive power holds much sway within the incoming US administration. The government ignored British ethnic minorities when we offered the truth of our own lineages to counter this propaganda. Ignoring the president and vice-president of America is slightly harder to pull off.
      That leaves Johnson looking particularly fragile and exposed. This week one of his predecessors, John Major – no stranger to strained relations with America when he was in office – warned that “complacency and nostalgia are the route to national decline”. Britain needed a reality check, Major cautioned. “We are no longer an irreplaceable bridge between Europe and America. We are now less relevant to them both.”
      Much of Britain’s decline is structural, set in motion long before Johnson took office. But if you wanted to exacerbate it, you’d struggle to find a more effective path than the one we are currently on. We have never in modern times endured anything quite as extreme as the toxic assault on America’s political culture left behind by Donald Trump. As usual, ours is a poor imitation. And like all cheap fakes, it’s not built to last.
      • Afua Hirsch is a Guardian columnist More

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      Doug Emhoff prepares to break new ground as America's second gentleman

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      As the first female vice-president and the first woman of colour to be nominated for the role, Kamala Harris has made history with her journey to the White House.
      Jill Biden, wife of president-elect Joe Biden, is expected to assume the title of first lady. Spouses of previous vice-presidents were given the informal designation of second lady.
      But now, as a result of Harris’s successes, her husband, Doug Emhoff, will break new ground too – as the US’s first second gentleman.
      The 56-year-old entertainment lawyer and father-of-two from California is also thought to be the first Jewish person to assume the “second spouse” role.
      At Biden’s first joint appearance with Harris as his running mate, the incoming president said: “Doug, you’re going to have to learn what it means to be a barrier-breaker yourself in this job you’re about to take on.”
      But already he appears to be reveling in the role. “I’m not overly political,” he told Marie Claire in October. “I’m overly her husband.” More

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      in Elections

      'An embarrassment': Joe Biden criticizes Trump's refusal to concede election

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      Joe Biden said Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election was “an embarrassment”, vowing to move forward with the presidential transition despite resistance from the White House and Republican leaders.
      Biden, answering questions for the first time since he was declared the winner of the 2020 election, intensified his criticism of the president, who continued to baselessly allege voter fraud, and said Trump’s denial would “not help his legacy”.
      Though the situation at the White House has caused deepening alarm over whether the US would witness a smooth transfer of power that has been a hallmark of American democracy for generations, Biden promised his team was “going to get right to work” confronting the compounding crises facing the nation.
      Pointing to unfounded claims of voter fraud, Trump, with the support of senior Republicans in Washington, has maintained that the election is not over and is contesting the results in several states, despite it being called for Biden on Saturday morning almost four days after the polls closed.
      In a call with reporters on Monday, transition officials said the General Services Administration had yet to issue a letter of “ascertainment” that would recognize Biden as the president-elect and allow his team to begin the transfer of power.
      Until the decision is made, Biden’s staff cannot meet with their counterparts in the White House and other federal agencies, begin to perform background checks for potential appointees or receive security briefings.
      Biden insisted the delay “does not change the dynamic at all of what we’re able to do”. Receiving the intelligence briefings that are traditionally shared with the incoming president “would be useful,” he said, but added: “We don’t see anything slowing us down, quite frankly.”

      Biden was joined by the vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, at a theater near his home in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, where they delivered remarks after the US supreme court heard the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act.
      The Democratic leadership have vowed to protect and expand the signature legislation from the Obama administration, in which Biden served as vice-president, during the worst public health crisis in more than a century.
      The US recently surpassed 10m cases of coronavirus, as most states struggled to contain outbreaks during the latest wave of infections.
      “In the middle of a deadly pandemic that’s affecting more than 10 million Americans, these ideologues are once again trying to strip health coverage away from the American people,” Biden said of the Republican state officials who brought the lawsuit that has ended up before the supreme court, aiming to invalidate the healthcare law.
      Democrats made healthcare a central theme of the election, and a focus of the supreme court hearing last month for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, whose confirmation cemented a 6-3 conservative court.
      The health coverage of millions of Americans hangs in the balance if the court rules in favor of Republicans, though Tuesday’s arguments indicated that the justices were skeptical of striking down the entire law.
      “Each and every vote for Joe Biden was a statement that healthcare in America should be a right and not a privilege,” Harris said in her remarks. She added: “And Joe Biden won this election decisively.” More

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      Can Joe Biden and Kamala Harris unite America after Trump – video explainer

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      When Joe Biden formally takes over the presidency in January he will face some of the greatest crises to hit the US in recent history: a pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans, a devastated economy, a rapidly overheating climate and a deeply fractured nation.
      The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino looks at how Biden and the vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris, plan to ‘heal’ the country after four years of Trumpism – and the challenges they will face with the prospect of having to navigate these times without a majority in the Senate
      How Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the fight for America’s soul – video More

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      in US Politics

      Soul of the nation: how Joe Biden's faith will shape his presidency

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      He carries a rosary in his pocket, one that belonged to his dead son, Beau. On election day last Tuesday, he went to mass, as he does every Sunday.
      In his victory speech on Saturday night, he quoted from Ecclesiastes: “The Bible tells us that to everything there is a season – a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow. And a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America.”
      For only the second time in US history, a Catholic will occupy the White House when Joe Biden is sworn in as the country’s 46th president. A man of profound faith, he has pledged to restore the “soul of the nation” after four years of rancour.
      At his side will be a vice-president who, as well as being the first woman of colour to hold the position, comes from a family that has embraced the Baptist church, Hinduism and Judaism.
      Catholic bishops in the US were quick to congratulate the president-elect, acknowledging that he will be only the second president to be a Catholic, John F Kennedy being the first.
      “At this moment in American history, Catholics have a special duty to be peacemakers, to promote fraternity and mutual trust, and to pray for a renewed spirit of true patriotism in our country,” said José Gomez, archbishop of Los Angeles and president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
      Biden’s Catholicism is at the core of his life and is likely to shape the way he governs as president.
      “I’m as much a cultural Catholic as I am a theological Catholic,” he wrote in his book, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics. “My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my religion. It’s not so much the Bible, the beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, the sacraments, or the prayers I learned. It’s the culture.”
      Less than two weeks ago, in an article for the Christian Post, Biden wrote: “My Catholic faith drilled into me a core truth – that every person on earth is equal in rights and dignity, because we are all beloved children of God.”
      As president, he added: “These are the principles that will shape all that I do, and my faith will continue to serve as my anchor, as it has my entire life.”
      Several of Biden’s campaign ads featured footage of his meetings with Pope Francis. In a 2015 interview, Biden said Francis was “the embodiment of Catholic social doctrine that I was raised with. The idea that everyone’s entitled to dignity, that the poor should be given special preference, that you have an obligation to reach out and be inclusive.” More