Let’s face it: the 2024 presidential campaign got a lot more personal when President Joe Biden announced he was leaving the race and passing the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris. Unable to attack the country’s first Black female Vice President on her mental acuity or her qualifications for office, the haters are hating in a major way — coming at her for everything from her racial identity to her laugh.
Suggested Reading
Of course, this is nothing new for Black women who have long dealt with being nitpicked half to death in professional and personal settings. This includes enduring calls to be less aggressive, less hostile and take up less space – a practice that dates back to slavery, according to Rutgers University history professor Deborah Gray White in her book “Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South.”
A few generations removed from chattel slavery, we watch this dynamic play out on our screens...as was the case when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas governor and former White House Press Secretary during the Trump administration, took a shot at Harris for not having biological children — suggesting that not having given birth makes her somehow less than.
“So my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble,” she said at a Michigan Town Hall event for Trump. “You would think after four years of straight failure, she would know a little humility.”
Harris clapped back at Huckabee Sanders in an Oct. 6 interview on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, calling out Huckabee Sanders’ comments for being both insensitive and completely out of touch.
“This is not the 1950s anymore. Families come in all kinds of forms,” Harris told host Alex Cooper. “I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one are not aspiring to be humble. Two, a whole lot of women out here who have a lot of love in their life, family in their life, and children in their life.”
A perfectly reasonable response, but some folks are still likely to attack Harris’ response as that of an “unreasonable” Black woman. And research backs this up: According to a study conducted by the Harvard Business Review, more people are likely to attribute a Black woman’s anger in the workplace to her personality than an offensive situation.
In this presidential race, it’s important to note that there isn’t a whole lot of humility coming from the other side of the aisle, as “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin pointed out.
“I find it odd that nobody is talking about Trump’s lack of humility,” she said on the show. “No man is ever told, ‘You need to be more humble.’”
While the debate about Harris’ humility will last until her Republican challenger finds some other ridiculous thing to attack her on, we like Jemele Hill’s idea for the Vice President’s response:
“I’m not aspiring to be humble...put that on a t-shirt,” she posted on X.
Straight From 
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.