The Paris Olympics may have ended, but the Entitlement Olympics continue to rage. Trump has declared he is “entitled to personal attacks” against Kamala Harris. Months before, Marjorie Taylor Greene felt entitled to insult Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during a congressional hearing. This sentiment was apparently shared by Chairman James Comer and other Republicans, since, despite violating House rules of decorum, she was not removed from the chamber. More recently, Nancy Mace has smirkingly announced that she is entitled to mispronounce Harris’ given name and call her “anything I want.” The irony-challenged Mace also declared that Harris “disrespects women” and “doesn’t know what a woman is.” More likely, Mace’s own respect for women extends only to white ones like herself.
Mind you, this is the same identity politics denouncing Nancy Mace who said, “I take great pride as a white female Republican to address the inadequacies in our country,” proudly touting her membership on the House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties while conveniently omitting the fact that she and Comer oversaw its dissolution. Yet this proud respecter of women backs a man who has boasted about and been found liable for sexual assault, habitually insults the physical appearance of women, and has the hots for his own daughter. None of this has dissuaded members of the cult of Trump from showing their support for him by donning golden diapers, affixing ear tampons to the side of their heads in solidarity with their flesh-wounded marigold messiah, and, in the case of his family values running mate, allegedly waving semen sample cups with Vance’s picture on them. Come again? If true, the only thing that separates Vance from Trump is that Trump would have included actual samples of his DNA and sold the cups to his supporters for $99.99.
However, just when one hoped the attacks on Harris couldn’t get any worse, they have. Not satisfied with the bogus charge that Harris has opportunistically “turned black,”1 her detractors now accuse her of suddenly turning into a woman, even as critics like Mace also claim she “doesn’t know what a woman is.” Brian Glenn, the boyfriend of Marjorie Taylor Greene, wonders if Kamala is “now embracing her femininity,” posting a video to X of his interview with Real America’s Voice in which he observes:
If you look at Kamala Harris back during the early days running with Joe Biden, she had a very watered-down look to her. She wore a lot of neutral colors, a lot of grays, a lot of blacks. Very few bright colored suits. And I’d even go as far as makeup. She didn’t have a lot of makeup on. Almost no jewelry, no rings, no necklaces. Nothing. And I think that was on point. And that was a time when kind of this while gender bender campaign was going on when they really didn’t want to celebrate, I think, a female. Now, if you look at her now and look at her campaign speeches and some of the pictures that’s pushed on social media and the ones that they do press conferences it’s a very different looking Kamala Harris. She very much embraces being a female. And I think that’s trying to speak to suburban women who might have been turned off on Trump for whatever reason, even though I believe that’s a completely fake narrative. . .
Seriously? If the goal is to secure the vote of suburban women through the sartorial finesse, then maybe Trump, who is polling poorly among them, might consider raiding Melania’s closet. Then again, with JD Vance on the ticket, there may be no need to. After all, like Harris, Vance, too, embraces his femininity, although leaked photographs of the crossdressing, serial prevaricator, name-shifting George Anthony Devolder Kitara Ravache Santos wannabe suggest he has a fondness for black – the color, not the people – and gold jewelry. Given the distaff Vance’s faux golden locks, should he lose the election and decide more openly to embrace his anima, there’s a good chance a job awaits him at FOX News, provided he can find a short enough skirt.
Forget Olympic breaking. Like entitlement, racial denigration has become an competitive event as online entrepreneurs vie to see who can most degrade Harris. Stickers are the chosen medium of racial calumny. Some, like “Fool-Aid: Kamalaberry,” feature a can with a portrait of Harris in Indian attire sporting a bindi. Other more derogatory stickers include “My Dog is Smarter than Harris,” “Ho Hos,” and “On Her Knees,” the last, a mock Harris 2024 campaign sticker that shows the silhouette of a woman kneeling to perform fellatio. Unlike the assault on Trump’s ear, these images are an assault on the eye – and the soul – that, sadly, reveals the perdurability and puerility of American racism and misogyny. True, some “satirical” Fool-Aid stickers target Trump as well. The difference, however, is that those aimed at Harris are rooted in racist and sexist tropes. Putting aside the racist association of Kool-Aid with black people, these stickers turned memes specifically mock Harris’ race and ethnicity and sexually objectify her. This is not the care for those directed at Trump: orange people are not a thing.
Far more unsettling have been tailgate bumper stickers that replace a hog-tied Biden with a similarly bound Harris, a depiction made even more ominous by the fact that Harris and her supporters have received death threats.
Ironically, for a party that denounces identity politics, the GOP seems to feel itself entitled to identify – and then deny – Harris’ race and gender and condemn her for her alleged racial “ambiguity.” Former FOX GQ it girl and the late Roger Ailes’ favorite twirler, Megyn Kelly, has accused Harris of sleeping her way to the top. Kelly is still spinning for conservatives, though now it is as a right-wing podcaster and X troll.
Still, the verbal attacks on black women continue, even after death. In a series of callously despicable posts on X, Laura Loomer has described the late Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee as a “ghetto bitch” and, borrowing another epithet from Trump’s misogynoiristic playbook, “one of the most low IQ members of Congress in the history of our nation.”
This sense of entitled racism even found its way into the Olympics itself. Former Olympian MyKayla Skinner questioned the “talent and depth” and “work ethic” of the U.S. Women’s Gymnastics Team – the most diverse ever, with four of the five gymnasts who represented the U.S. in Paris being women of color, or, in the eyes of insecure white supremacists and unthinking racist bullies, unqualified “DEI hires.” Or do they fear that athletics has now become a “black job”? The dog whistles of the past, the so-called “polite racism” of a generation ago, have become full-blown tuba crescendos.
Sadly, and admittedly, the pall of right-wing outrage and hypocrisy casts a wide shadow that breaches the color line. Candace Owens, who says she was bullied in her teens by racist whites and founded the presciently titled short-lived website SocialAutopsy.com to combat online bullying and also leads Blexit (black exit), the movement to persuade blacks to leave the Democratic Party, now bullies other blacks, apparently unaware that the right-wing causes she promotes have prompted not so much a Blexit as a Blaxit, as increasing numbers of black people opt to leave the United States entirely.
Herein lies the nauseating irony of the current pandemic of American racism and sexism: some of it is coming from members of the very groups it targets. For every Mace, Kelly, and Loomer, there is a Candace Owens, Byron Donald, Mark Robinson, and Michaelah Montgomery who, if they haven’t sold their souls to the devil, have decided to dance with him in the pale moonlight, perhaps because the pay is better, whether they are paid in taxi dancer dimes or the fleeting currency of online notoriety and clickbait capitalism.
In an August 14 C-SPAN interview, Montgomery, another Blexit, supporter, defended Trump’s questioning of Harris’ blackness and, in a fact-free rant, claimed not only that Harris is inauthentically black but, channeling Glenn, that the fraudulent personae she projects is based, in part, on the color (or lack thereof) of her sartorial choices. While painful to read, Montogomery’s spiel is worth quoting at length:
Black voters are offended by everything except the conditions in which their reality is set. So, while we may be offended that a rich white man is questioning the nationality of a quote unquote black woman, that black woman does not claim to be black outside of campaign season. So, we saw her be black [uses air quotes] as she was vying to be V.P. – the hot sauce on the pork chops, the marching with the band. All of a sudden she’s paying attention to her A.K.A sorority sisters. But then once sworn in office, you didn’t see the acknowledgment of her sorority or HBCU [Historical Black College and Universiiy] she didn’t wear pink, she didn’t wear green, she didn’t wear anything HU [Howard University]. She also did not acknowledge the black community while in office. We saw bills signed for Asians. We saw bills passed for migrants, which primarily affect the Hispanic community. We saw bills passed for literally everyone but black people. So, for her, additionally, last thing, after she took that oath of office, she went on record to say that she was the first South Asian vice president. At no point in time did she promote her blackness, at no point in time acknowledge her blackness, at no point in time does she market herself as a black woman. And that was when she was attorney general, that’s back when she was D.A., that’s all the way until she was senator and, of course, as vice president. So, the fact that, again, she is using this black card during the election just so black people will turn out and vote for her, and then, if she were to win, she would be in office and then fail those same black people who did everything in their power to get her in. I think that’s disgusting, I think that that’s unfair, and I think that’s that why I personally reached out to the Trump campaign and asked if I could speak (emphasis added).
In contrast, Montgomery presents herself as a politically attuned, authentically black mouthpiece for conservatives precisely because she is, at least by her own definition, “authentically black”:
Because I’m like, you guys may be offended when he [Trump] says it, but what are you gonna do when I say it? Because, at the end of the day, I am a black woman, I’ve lived a black life, and therefore… and I pay attention to politics. So, I was actually excited for her when she ran for president the first time. Just the fact that she was in the race. I was like, okay, HBCU, do your thing. But she never acknowledged HBCUs. In the first hundred days of the administration, they cut funding to HBCUs. She did nothing to support the very people that she’s now leaning on to win this election.
What she and other melanated right-wing ideologues fail to acknowledge is that lies and disinformation are inherently offensive regardless of the skin color of their source. Then again, people are entitled to their ignorance, or so it would seem.
Note
[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.
