Kamala Harris is tapping into the Black Joy movement
Analysis by John Blake, CNN
It’s been called “Kamalamania,” “Kamalmentum,” and “Kamelot.” Others dismiss it as “irrational exuberance,” or a political sugar high led by a “ding dong.”
In the five weeks since Kamala Harris upended the 2024 presidential race, the commentariat has used all kinds of phrases to describe Democrats’ euphoria about her sudden White House run.
But there is another electoral force propelling Harris’ candidacy that has barely been noticed: “Black Joy.”
Harris isn’t just “campaigning on joy,” as so many commentators have recently noted. She is also tapping into something called the “Black Joy” movement. Led by Black artists, authors, activists and others, the movement declares that Black people’s humanity will not be defined by trauma or oppression but by something else:
“A joy that no White man can steal.”
That’s how the author Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts describes the movement’s essence in her book, “Black Joy.”
Black Joy is hard to define but easy to see and feel. It’s the annual Black Joy Parade, festive Juneteenth celebrations and loud Black family reunions with plenty of, yes, fried chicken while Earth, Wind & Fire’s feel-good anthem “September” plays from a portable speaker nearby.
It’s the recent viral image from the Paris Olympics when two Black American gymnasts — Simon Biles and Jordan Chiles — bowed in appreciation to a beaming Brazilian gold medal winner because, as Biles would say later, “it was an all-Black podium.”
It’s the Black Joy on display at this week’s Democratic National Convention. It’s rapper Lil Jon grabbing a microphone and acting as the Georgia’s delegation’s “hype man” during an electric, state-by-state roll call. It’s Black delegates shedding tears while listening to former President Barack Obama. It’s former first lady Michelle Obama sending the crowd into a frenzy when, referring to Trump, she said, “Who is going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”
This summer marks the first time in years that so many Black Americans feel hopeful.
“I haven’t felt this way since 2008 when a skinny kid with a funny name decided to run for president,” says Kimberly Coleman, an actor who lives in the swing state of Arizona, in a reference to Barack Obama.
Coleman says she’s hopped on recent Zoom calls with Black women and Black preachers to raise money and drum up support for Harris’ campaign against former President Donald Trump.
“The enthusiasm that everyone has, and the joy, is contagious,” she says.
Nothing will temper joy like the quickly changing fortunes of a presidential campaign, however. Consider that only recently, Trump’s momentum seemed unstoppable after he survived an assassination attempt and surged ahead of President Joe Biden in many polls.
Still, Harris is doing more than surfing the Black joy wave. She’s turned some of its core beliefs into a political strategy in at least two ways:
She uses laughter to show that she is free
Can an election turn on how one presidential candidate laughs and the other one doesn’t? That’s one of the quirks that commentators have noticed about this election: Harris laughs a lot, while Trump laughs not so much, if at all.
One CNN analyst noted that Harris will “laugh at herself in the midst of a speech, or in the midst of a press conference or during a ‘60 Minutes’ interview — otherwise serious moments when another politician might try to keep a straight face throughout.”
But there is a racial history behind Harris’ laughter that’s easy to miss.
Black laughter was used as a weapon against Black people long before Trump wielded it against Harris by dismissing her as “Laffin’ Kamala.” Slaveowners created the myth of the “happy-go-lucky darkie” to imply that Black people were happy being enslaved or being second-class citizens. To survive, many Black people played along by flashing a submissive, “just-happy-to-be-here, boss” laughter around White people.
Yet other Black people chose to laugh when and how they wanted — even if White folks didn’t like it.
Consider this quote by a Black man born into slavery as described in the book, “Black Joy.”
“Others have said I laugh loudly and often. This too is true,” the man says. “I’ve found that my joy is the most irritating to those who are righteously indignant at my audacity to walk around like I’m free.”
This is the kind of laughter that Harris evokes. Her laugh signals to Black supporters and White allies that she is free to do what she wants. It’s loud, raucous, and maybe a little strange, but it doesn’t appear to be curated for White sensibilities.
“I have my mother’s laugh,” Harris said in one recent interview. And I grew up around a bunch of women in particular, who laughed from the belly. … They would sit around the kitchen and drinking their coffee, telling big stories with big laughs.”
It’s the kind of laughter that women of all colors find liberating, wrote Robin Givhan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer with the Washington Post, in a recent essay. Givhan said Harris’ laughter enrages critics who attack her as a diversity hire.
“There was a time when Black folks had to curtail their emotions in public. When women were considered ill-mannered if they chortled freely,” Givhan wrote. “Harris has the audacity to look unruffled by the characterization … Her laughter is edifying precisely because it leaves some folks enraged. Who does she think she is?”
She won’t let White men define her Blackness
Harris’ Black Joy seems unruffled by something else: A White man’s attempt to define her racial identity.
Harris claims both Black and South Asian heritage as the US-born daughter of a woman who emigrated to the US from India and a father who came from Jamaica.
When Trump questioned Harris’ Black bona fides at a recent conference of Black journalists, it was widely seen as a clumsy attempt to cast her as a racial opportunist.
“Now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” the former president said. By doing so, Trump evoked a ugly tradition in this country.
White men have long decided who was Black or White in America. Under the notorious one-drop rule, for example, White people defined a person as Black even if they had a White parent. Any drop of Blackness was considered a taint to the perceived purity of Whiteness.
Trump launched a similar attack against Obama by questioning the place of his birth. Questions about Obama’s heritage proved so insistent that he felt compelled to release his birth certificate.
But Harris barely acknowledged Trump’s questioning of her racial identity. She called it “the same old show — the divisiveness and the disrespect…” at a rally and pressed on with her campaign.
This, too, is a manifestation of Black joy — not letting White people’s perception of your Blackness rattle or define you.
“It’s not what they call you, but what you answer to,” is how Lewis-Giggetts describes this attitude in her book, “Black Joy.”
Harris’ reaction underscores a subtle difference between how she and Obama have regarded their biracial identity. Obama was open about wrestling with his identity as the son of a Black father and a White mother, and his search for a place to belong.
But Harris does not seem to have grappled with a similar angst. She attended Howard University, a historically Black school, where she pledged a Black sorority. She doesn’t appear to invest a lot of energy into explaining her identity to others. Her public persona carries no hint of the “Tragic Mulatto” — a biracial, typically female stereotype who can’t find acceptance in Black or White worlds.
When questioned about her Blackness during a 2019 interview, Harris said she was not going to spend a lot of energy “trying to educate people about who Black people are.
“I’m Black, and I’m proud of being Black. I was born Black. I will die Black,” she said. “I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”
What those who question Harris’ Blackness may miss is that many of the Black community’s most revered leaders and artists have had White parents. Reggae icon Bob Marley, civil rights activist Booker T. Washington, statesman Frederick Douglass, playwright August Wilson, author Malcom Gladwell — all are biracial.
Harris’ racial identity makes her a quintessential American, according to Albert Murray, the Black author and cultural critic who has argued that American culture is “incontestably mulatto.”
“No white American is fully and only white; no black American is fully and wholly black,” Murray wrote. “We have lived in another one another’s company too long and too intimately, shaped by the same forces of nature and culture alike.”
Is Black Joy enough to get Harris elected?
One of the big questions of this election is how far Black Joy can carry Harris. Will it dissipate as soon as the inevitable setbacks occur? And are some afraid to embrace Black joy because they don’t want to be disappointed again?
“I’m concerned but not scared,” Coleman, the actor, says about the prospect of a Harris letdown.
Recent polling may alleviate some of Coleman’s concerns. While polls in the spring showed Trump making inroads among Black voters, a CNN/SSRS poll published last month — after Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee — found her leading Trump among registered Black voters, 78% to 15%. That’s an improvement over CNN polling data from April and June, when the same voters favored Biden over Trump by 70% to 23%.
Coleman says she’s not concerned that Black voters will abandon Harris because they’ve experienced the alternative: four years of relentless racial tension under Trump. The fear of another Trump presidential term is feeding into Black support of Harris, she says.
Obama showed in 2008 and 2012 that enthusiasm among the Black electorate translates into actual votes. Harris may be poised to do the same.
“There’s even more enthusiasm than there was for Obama,” Coleman says of Harris’ White House run. “We weren’t threatened by John McCain (Obama’s 2008 presidential opponent). He was just another Republican. We hadn’t seen anything that McCain had done so bad that it would be like, ‘Lord Jesus, let me go get my passport.’ But seriously now people are saying, ‘If Trump wins, we gotta go (out of the country).’ ”
If Harris wins it will mark a dramatic change — not only for Democrats’ fortunes, but for the mood in Black America.
The Black community has disproportionately suffered from the Covid-19 pandemic, a GOP-led backlash to the 2020 “racial reckoning” after George Floyd’s murder, and the never-ending videos of unarmed Black men and women being shot down or beaten to death by police officers.
Harris offers something different. It’s not just joy; it’s Black Joy.
And in an election that might be determined by Black voters in swing states like Georgia and Pennsylvania, Black Joy may turn out to be her most potent political asset.
John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”
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