Like some other liberal Democrats who resisted warnings in July that President Biden should abandon his reelection bid, I resisted the “It’s time to go, Joe” messages that poured out of news reports and commentary. If Biden survived reelection in November, I figured, he wouldn’t have to storm the country again; he could continue working from the Oval Office to advance the experienced, sensible decision-making he’d been delivering since 2021 (with one notable exception in the Middle East).
Even as he stepped down and endorsed Kamala Harris as his successor, I wondered whether his vice president was experienced and wise enough to continue his best work. Campaigning brilliantly is not the same as governing, and a disturbingly large portion of the racially abrasive and/or misogynistic electorate will not vote for her, even though some of her members did vote for an African-American man in 2008 in the wake of the Bush administration’s Iraq War fiasco, Hurricane Katrina’s failed emergency management, and the 2008 financial crisis—the latter in complicity with neoliberal Democrats who thought that breaking glass ceilings was an excuse for tearing up the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which Bill Clinton signed into law in 1999, enabling the wild financing plunge that precipitated the crisis.
Would a President Harris really continue Joe Biden’s efforts to build back better? Her initiatives as vice president have been muted, even mooted. Even now, we must be assured of her professed commitment to strengthening the legal and economic foundations of working- and middle-class safety and civility.
Fortunately, one of Harris’ first truly independent, consequential governing decisions – making Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz her running mate – promises to rescue diversity at its best from elitist, progressive “diversity, equity and inclusion” policies that sometimes put every ethnoracial group in its place with a label on its face. “We have so much more in common than what divides us,” she said in her nomination acceptance speech last night.
Her own family background and marriage have shown that true diversity cannot be pre-scripted and bureaucratically imposed. It is a consequence of fair laws and practices that are not “of color” or “white” and that do not Make your racial features or last name a signal that you are the bearer of a “culture” with which you may not truly identify. Such generic “diversity” reinforces the opposite of civic vibrancy and individual freedom. It casts your citizenship and even your personhood as ethnoracial when you first walk into a classroom, workplace, or courtroom.
That kind of diversity doesn’t curb racist discrimination as much as it reiterates it. Its torturous racial etiquette often elicits invective as surely as hypocrisy elicits hostility. And it twists sincere attempts to refocus our racial lenses from pious conservative pretenses into colorblindness that masks monstrous injustices. I’ve made such arguments in many ways, including here at Salon and elsewhere extensively in my book Liberal Racism (whose opening chapter, “Life After Diversity,” I urge you to click on and read). This year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first elite university to no longer require applicants to submit statements detailing how they would promote diversity. MIT, whose enrollment share of black students in last year’s incoming freshman class fell to 5 percent from 15 percent the year before the Supreme Court’s decision to ban affirmative action, isn’t saying that diversity is bad; it’s saying that commitments to promote diversity can’t be prescribed and enforced as they have been through “Diversity, Equity, and Exclusion” protocols.
Harris’ own mixed ethno-racial background of Jamaican and Indian ancestry was a product of her parents’ freedom. It confounds the simplistic color-coding and racial mind games played by people like someone I’ll call “Donnie ‘Bone Spurs’ Trumpf.” Harris, by choice, chose the historically black Howard University as her college, and she honors the African-American identity that Obama, whose ancestry was also racially mixed, embraced and internalized, but as a presidential candidate she rightly looks beyond her racial identification.
Far from being the toxic “white man” that haunts too many progressive imaginaries and pronouncements, Tim Walz is one of a truly countless number of white men who have built bridges to transracial justice. Those bridges may not be exactly what Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro had in mind when he praised Walz by saying, “Everyone in America knows that if you need a bridge, call this guy,” but the metaphor carries with it do-it-yourself and social justice commitments. White bridge builders were key to liberating the segregationist South, as historian David Chappel shows in his book Inside Agitators.
I wonder why those who advocate for maximum fluidity in sexual identity continue to confine us to ethno-racial categories, urging non-conformists to “stick to their own turf” rather than learn from and connect with one another, as tens of millions of Americans do. The growing prominence of biracial and non-racial citizens in recent U.S. census reports suggests that the old bourgeois-cultural norm of “whiteness” is fading, and that no other official color-coding can tell us who “we” really are.
In 1920, philosopher George Santayana wrote that Americans “have all been torn from their various soils and ancestries and thrown together into a single vortex, whirling irresistibly in a space otherwise utterly empty. To be an American is itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.” He may not have been thinking transracially, but he was certainly making this point: Precisely because the United States is more racially and ethnically complex than institutional color-coding comprehends, we should be working overtime to foster principles, habits, and bonds that transcend racial grouping into a civic culture thick enough to thrive on postracial terms.
The struggle of people of color to share fully in a larger American identity is one of the most powerful epics of unrequited love in the history of the world. Even if every broken heart could be healed and every theft of opportunity repaired, ethnoracial communities would still rightly honor the tenacity and resistance that kept their members going. Ultimately, however, Santayana was right: if America is to survive as a liberal democratic republic, it must stop making ethnoracial distinctions a key organizing principle of its legal and educational public life.
To do that, we must recognize what Harris and Walz and millions of biracial young Americans have shown in different but converging ways: We are not going backward. True diversity will free us from so-called whiteness and blackness as bearers of hope.
