OP-ED: Kamala Harris, for the Black People
“Black Vote, Black Power,” a collaboration between Keith Boykin and Word In Black,
examines the issues, the candidates, and what’s at stake for Black America in the 2024 presidential election.
LONDON — Certain Black people on the internet keep raising two questions about Kamala Harris. What is her Black agenda? And why didn’t she do it during the last four years?
First, if you want to know Kamala Harris’s Black agenda, look at what she’s already done. As vice president, Kamala Harris helped to pass the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, provided a record $16 billion in funding to HBCUs, $2.8 billion for Pell grants and need-based assistance, $2 billion to Black farmers, $2 billion to clean up pollution in communities of color, doubled the number of Black businesses in America, and brought us the lowest Black unemployment rate and the lowest Black poverty rate in history.
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The Biden-Harris administration also expanded the child tax credit, which cut the Black child poverty rate in half, capped the cost of insulin at $35 for seniors, which is especially important for Black people who are disproportionately affected by diabetes, signed up 5 million more people for Obamacare, canceled $168.5 billion in student loan debt for 4.8 million people, pardoned thousands of marijuana charges, and on top of all that, even signed a law creating the first new Black-related federal holiday in forty years — Juneteenth.
At the same time, they appointed more Black judges than any administration in history, and gave us the first Black woman on the Supreme Court and the first Black vice president. And those federal judges have lifetime tenure, so they’ll be on the bench for decades to come.
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Trump was president for four years and he didn’t do any of those things. In fact, he was the first president since Richard Nixon 50 years ago to appoint no Black judges to the U.S. Courts of Appeals. And the judges he did appoint are the very ones striking down the laws and policies that help Black people.
People need to have realistic expectations about what a president can and cannot do.
Now, the second question. Why hasn’t Kamala Harris done whatever thing you think she should have done in the last four years? The answer. She’s not the president. She’s the vice president, and that person’s job is to help the president. But even if she were president, people need to have realistic expectations about what a president can and cannot do.
The president leads one of our three co-equal branches of government. For those who missed “Schoolhouse Rock,” the three branches are legislative, executive, and judicial. Congress, the legislature, makes the laws. The president, the executive, enforces the laws. And the judiciary, through the Supreme Court and lower courts, interprets the laws.
In the UK, the executive and legislature are combined in Parliament. The prime minister comes from the legislature and has the power to enact their own agenda. It makes it easier to get things done, but we don’t have that system in the U.S.
Currently, we have a divided Congress, with a Republican House of Representatives and a Democratic Senate. The House is gerrymandered, giving members no incentive to work with a president from the other party. And the Senate is constitutionally unrepresentative of the country.
That’s why the 1.6 million people in the mostly white and rural Dakotas get four U.S. senators, while the nearly 40 million people in the racially diverse state of California get only two U.S. senators. That means the people of South Dakota have 50 times more power than the people in California in the Senate. The legislature is rigged against us.
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And, unfortunately, so are the courts. Because of the antiquated electoral college system for picking presidents, we have an unrepresentative Supreme Court with six of the nine justices appointed by Republican presidents, despite the fact that Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
So, even if Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, Cornel West — or any imaginary candidate you think might be more radical or more pro-Black than Kamala Harris — was elected president, there’s very little that any president can do in our system of government that won’t be blocked by Republicans in Congress or overruled by the Republican-appointed judges on the federal courts.
That’s why we can’t just vote once every four years in a presidential election and complain when things don’t work out. We have to vote in every election, every year, in primaries, runoffs, and general elections, up and down the ballot, for city council, mayor, judge, school board member, county commissioner, state representative, governor, senator, vice president, and president.
But the choice is clear. If you want a president who has spent his life attacking Black people, from the Central Park Five to Barack Obama to Colin Kaepernick, Trump is your guy. If you want a president who won’t be able to accomplish everything we want but will move us in the right direction and has a record to prove it, Kamala Harris is the one.
And if you want a king or queen to be your leader, move to London.
Keith Boykin is a New York Times–bestselling author, TV and film producer, and former CNN political commentator. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, Keith served in the White House, cofounded the National Black Justice Coalition, cohosted the BET talk show My Two Cents, and taught at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University in New York. He’s a Lambda Literary Award-winning author and editor of seven books. He lives in Los Angeles.
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