Kamala Harris, Race, and the Presidency; Plus, Louisa Thomas on the Paris Olympics
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I think it's fair to say there are no safe predictions to make in this election. That is very clear. But we're talking on the program today about Kamala Harris, who we've got to presume, at least for the moment, is the Democratic nominee. Two of our staff writers got together to talk about Harris's candidacy, and in particular, the question of race. Sixteen years after Barack Obama won the presidency, does race still matter, or better put, how does it matter in a presidential election?

Vincent Cunningham and Doreen Sanfelix are both critics at The New Yorker. Vincent also wrote the book Great Expectations, a novel based on his experience working for the Obama campaign. They spoke with Tyler Foggett, an editor at The New Yorker, and one of the hosts of our podcast, The Political Scene.

Well, you know, I think that most times when people bring Kamala Harris and Barack Obama into the same conversation, they are kind of mistaken, right? That it's just this kind of wish casting. But what they do have in common is a black father who is not from America, right?

And this brings all kinds of strange things into being. And they both, in creating a Black American identity, right, and trying to curate, like, to sort of

And I shouldn't say trying to. I don't know what the sort of level of intention was. But the same way that Barack Obama sort of goes to Chicago, joins Trinity Church, sits under the preaching and the tutelage of Jeremiah Wright. You can think of the parallel motion in Kamala Harris's life is like going to an HBCU, joining a

perhaps the most famous historically Black sorority, the AKAs, tying themselves to a more distinctly American form of Blackness than the one that is signified by their fathers. And that, to me, is really interesting because Black identity, Black American identity is always like

constructed even by those of us who like sort of have more traditionally black American family histories, right? It's always a function, at least in part, of choices that are made not simply by heredity or genetics or whatever, more pernicious ways that you can figure somebody's identity. And politics also, like blackness, is the process of

identity creation, right? And so to the extent that that writing oneself into a specifically American form of blackness and also writing oneself into public consciousness as a politician must, those two things going in concert, that parallel motion is what I'm interested in about both of those figures.

And I wonder, I really do wonder, Kamala has been very good about this. You know, you can see, again, videos of her kind of like, it sounds like a college marching band and she's like marching in the middle of the street. It's like a very like culturally recognizable thing that she's doing. She's been pretty good at managing these symbols. So I do wonder how she's going to continue to do that over the course of the next hundred or so days. That's really interesting information.

incredibly interesting and astute. It makes me think about the in some ways ignored trip that Harris had made to the continent of Africa, which is how it was framed as almost like an ancestral going home journey. That was in March of 2023. Harris went for a nine-day trip

She, you know, started off in Ghana and then ended up in Tanzania and Zambia. And it was described as, you know, some people as a kind of like charm offensive. And the first time that a vice president was demonstrating, you know, a kind of like modernized interest in what was happening in the continent, you know, in the context of increased Chinese investment within many African countries, Harris was...

Potentially taking on an issue that no one else cared about and could have honed a more acute vision of her identity through it. And yet the profile in The Atlantic expresses a kind of disappointment or frustration with her performance during this trip because she didn't actually convey the going back to the motherland excitement that people were expecting. And what I find really interesting is

about the trip to Africa, about her relationship to American Blackness, is also what is unsaid is her relationship to her South Indian-ness. Obviously right now Modi is the leader of India. We don't seem to think of asking Harris about her relationship to that fascism happening on the other side of the world. And it speaks to this idea that I'm trying to work through and I think many of us are trying to work through is like,

slipperiness of what it is to be an Asian American and how that idea is manufactured within our ideas of American exceptionalism. And

And I wonder when that part of her identity, which she gets from the mother, right? That's the matriarchal condition that Harris so much praises in her memoir and in her personal anecdotes. When will it come to the fore in political conversation? There was so much talk this week about

The Zoom call that 44,000 Black women attended, and then there was a Zoom call for Black men, but Kamala Harris is also an Indian woman. And I find the lack of engagement with that reality to be, there's just like a, I think a level of like delusion there.

It seems like part of the reason why we focus on Harris's blackness and less so on the fact that she is also South Asian is that people are just really excited about the idea of having a female Barack Obama. Vincent, you worked on Obama's campaign. Do you think that this is an accurate comparison or...

Is it kind of a reductive one? I mean, is there a more expansive way that we should be thinking about her identity? Yeah. At least as a campaigner and as a sort of carrier of the sort of mood of the moment or response to a zeitgeist. What Harris lacks...

in terms of like sort of coding herself along a political spectrum, is the one issue that makes you seem more progressive than you are. Like Barack Obama had, I was against the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton, you were not. Was such a big and powerful code for I am to the left of you.

Back in the days, those terms were, you know, as Democrats, you were either wine track or beer track. Right. And it made him the wine track candidate of Ivy League professors or whatever, you know, something like that. It coded him in a way that was very strong. Does it matter, though, since she's not going through a primary? That's I think that is what is really, you know, because to your point, she was the Medicare for all thing was a way for her to sort of tack on.

closer to Bernie and Elizabeth Warren, but not all the way, but to the left, again, in a coded way of the likes of Klobuchar, Biden, Buttigieg, et cetera, trying to be in the middle of that crowd. Now she doesn't have to do that. That's a great point. For me, I've always thought about her like more in terms of like California, right?

Thinking about her in concert with like people like her political mentor, among other things, Willie Brown, like the machine politics of California. We'll talk more about Brown later. Absolutely. Or like over and against Gavin Newsom, her sort of career long frenemy or whatever. Like that to me has been like a really interesting aspect of her political character, which is not necessarily ideological, but comes down to tactics like, you know, being on the horn or whatever.

Well, if Harris does become like a single issue candidate, it's going to be on the Dobbs decision. And she's kind of like perfectly slotted into a advocacy of the reinstitution of reproductive rights using what is essentially to me language that even verges on the conservative. Harris had a appearance, I think it was in Michigan, where she spoke with two conservative women, right?

Republicans, one of whom had been someone who had worked in the Trump administration. And the way that she talked about abortion was very different from the way that the Harris had talked about abortion in the past. She very much couched it, of course, in this idea that

A woman who decides to terminate a pregnancy or to seek this care is doing so under the advisement or counsel of her rabbi or her imam or her priest. I think she understands that to stay in the center right now is like her best bet. It's believed that she was the first sitting vice president or president to visit an abortion clinic. You know, when I read that, I remember...

wondering, you know, is abortion one of her deeper commitments or does it seem like this is an issue that she has kind of taken the lead on because Biden, who was Catholic, is kind of uncomfortable with it? So it's quite interesting. There's a story in her memoir that she has been resurfacing as of late. When Harris was in high school, I believe in Oakland, she had a friend who came to her

And told her that she was being molested by her stepfather, I believe. And Harris incensed for her friend, went to her mother, told her the story and said, my friend needs to move in with us. And her mother agreed. And the friend did live with her for a time. And she's been telling this story, which as far as...

origin, you know, myths or stories go is quite gruesome to listen to. It shows to me, it's a way of like recontextualizing the abortion rights issue again within a emotive space that she can exploit because she is a woman. I think that we're definitely not in this like Clintonian era where we're

The gender has to be both lampooned, but also diminished in order to be in the boys club. Harris is not playing that game at all, which is why, you know, the Republican retorts calling her like a crazy cat lady or whatever are not actually really working because she's not dependent on like framing herself as a politician who believes in abortion rights because she is a woman. It's so much more about this like moral space.

Doreen Sanfelix with Vincent Cunningham. They're both staff writers for The New Yorker, and they spoke with editor Tyler Foggett. And you can hear a longer version of that conversation on The Political Scene, a podcast from The New Yorker. There's more coming up on The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. WNYC Studios is supported by Rocket Money.

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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm joined by Louisa Thomas, who writes our column, The Sporting Scene.

Louisa, I am so glad, so relieved to be talking to you. We've been talking about nothing but politics for so long. Yes, we'll be talking about the Olympics, in which politics have never been involved. The despair of it. The Summer Olympics, however, are here. They're starting in Paris this week, but not every event will be held in a stadium or a sports complex. And you've got three unexpected venues where different events will be held. What's the first one?

The first is a river.

As it happens, the Seine. And in fact, this is the site not only of a couple of events, including the marathon swim and the triathlon, but also the opening ceremonies. It's a three-mile course down the river. Athletes will be traveling on barges as part of the Olympic parade. They'll pass the Louvre, the Notre Dame, you know, what could go wrong? Such show-offs. Yeah.

They actually had this idea after like the 2018 Youth Games. There was a festival like in the streets for this Youth Games opening ceremony. And they thought, well, why don't we do that? They'd actually really tried to reimagine the Olympics because the Olympics have become so overwhelmingly expensive.

And Paris decided that it was going to do something, quote unquote, sustainable. It is still incredibly expensive. It's like the sixth most expensive Olympics ever and will cost billions of dollars. But a lot of the stadiums that they're building are temporary in an effort to cut down costs. And they're really trying to kind of be creative about it. And they thought, you know...

What better way to showcase the city than a romantic cruise down the Seine?

What you're saying is it's actually really a sewer? Is that what you're saying? Something like that. You are absolutely correct, actually. It has been illegal to swim in the Seine for a century because it is a cesspool. But they have spent $1.5 billion on treatment plan renovations and also building a giant holding tank that

near the Australis train station. It's the size of 20 Olympic swimming pools. And the idea is that the real problem with the sun is actually not people like dumping their cranes

crap into the sun, although there's a lot of that. The real problem is that when it rains, this antiquated sewer system overflows and this untreated sewage mixed in the pipes just flows right into the river. So they have tried- I know when I'm diving in a river and I'm going to be in there for a while for a triathlon or a marathon swim, the phrase that I want to be having resonate in my mind is untreated sewage. Well, let me say, first of all,

Open water swimmers have swum in some pretty gnarly circumstances. Like, this will not be their first time that they've swum in, like, less than pristine waters. However, yeah, this is bad. Levels of bacteria routinely top what is considered safe for swimming. And even after this tremendous effort, in the case of storms, really big rains will still overflow it. And several readings in June...

Let's just say it's a good thing I didn't qualify this time around. Yeah, the mayor of Paris actually promised that she would swim in the sun as like a kind of guarantee of how clean it was. And they kept pushing back the date. Finally, last week, she jumped in very briefly. She did. A little bit cold. She did. Right. Yeah. She's still alive. She's still alive.

the president, Macron, has said that he will do it, but not before the Olympics. He's going to let the swimmers be the guinea pigs. If things get really bad, they will cancel the swimming portion, or one option is to cancel the swimming portion of the triathlon and make it a duathlon and to move the marathon swim to where the kayakers and canoers do their thing. But the hope is that they will be able to swim and that once the Olympics leave next summer, they're going to have swimming pools in the sun where

Hot Parisians are going to be able to cool off among the, well, I'm not going to say it. Hot Parisians cooling off. You got the headline now. Now, venue number two as the cool venue of this year's Olympics is? The number two cool event is the Place de la Concorde, the kind of famous place where people get their head chopped off during the French Revolution. Right.

But instead of decapitations, we're going to see what on the cluster? So it's this is kind of like the youth games. This is like the Olympics has been making this tremendous effort in the past few decades to try and attract young eyeballs or rather, you know, probably television under immense pressure as ratings continue to decline to to reach an expanded viewership.

And they are doing that with like sports like three on three basketball, skateboarding. And then the only new event at this Paris Olympics, which is breaking, which is, you know, grows out of hip hop in the 1970s in the Bronx. And it's basically these they're called B-boys and B-girls are going to square off.

and have a little kind of competition. The DJ picks the music. They have to respond to it. There are judges. They all have names. Like the U.S. is represented by B-Boy Victor, who is actually the world champion. And other prominent breakers are Shiggy Kicks, B-Boy Phil Wizard, B-Boy Danny Dan, B-Girl Emi. I think this is going to be actually huge. There's a lot of interest in breaking. Are there any countries that are particularly big?

good at breakdancing as a sport? Well, the United States of America is where this is born. Yes, yes. Indeed, indeed. We dominate. Yeah, so, yeah, and actually B-Girl Sunny, she's a former former exec, I think. I don't want to say she's an exec, but she's a poor high-ranking person at Estee Lauder. She quit her job to focus on breaking. But I think Japan is quite good. There's a pretty big breaking scene in Europe as well.

We're calling it breaking now and not breakdancing? Apparently breakdancing is actually somewhat pejorative. I actually cannot tell you why, but they don't like it to be called breakdancing. And breaking... Oh, and I never said it. Yeah, breaking refers to the breaks in the music. It's something I did not... I sort of thought it was like your body will break when you assume these positions as you dive onto hard floors, but it's actually like the breaks in the music for the beats. I think it could be both. Rock your shoes and these are the breaks.

Break it up, break it up, break it up. What other venue sticks out at the Paris Olympics? So we're going to travel very, very far, thousands of miles to French Polynesia, to Chaupu and Tahiti, which is the site of an iconic break, which is where the surfing is going to be taking place, which is one of these other events that has been added to attract the cool kids.

So we have surfing and Bill Finnegan, our great surfing correspondent, will definitely approve. Well, it's somewhat controversial, I've got to say. The Olympics, like this, this is a village apparently has like a snack bar, like that's the restaurant in this. And this is kind of a hidden, you know, gem. And now the world is going to be descending on this like tiny fishing village that some people are, you might imagine, somewhat concerned about.

about what it's going to do to this small city. They're saying all this, the event, you know, the structures will be temporary except for this, like, three-story aluminum tower which is drilled into the coral, which is very fragile. So... That can't be good. Yeah, no, can't be good. Can't be good. Now, I...

A little tender question. How have people reacted to this venue being used, given the kind of stark reminder of French colonialism? You know, this is actually kind of, I was sort of looking for more of an outcry than I found. I mean, this is considered one of serving's iconic sites. So I think there wasn't a lot of surprise when they chose, and there's a lot of pride over this. But yeah, I mean, colonialism.

is that, I mean, it's a reminder of, frankly, like the Olympics, you know, checkered history itself. You know, this is a kind of a, you know, a 19th century antiquated project. I think most of the concern has been less kind of

and more of it has been environmental and also kind of threat to the way of life. That's where a lot of the focus of the protest has been, not so much like why is France, you know, presuming to, you know, quote, unquote, own this, you know, place thousands of miles away, but why are they going to sort of degrade this very special, fragile place? Because, you know, they're going to have a like a

a competition. Right, against that stark political background, what surfers should we look out for when we tune into the surfing competition? Some of the favorites of the event are John John Florence from the U.S. and Gabe Medita on the men's side, a Brazilian.

On the women's side, we have actually a local favorite known as the Queen of Chapo, Vahine Fierro. She's 24 years old. She's goofy-footed. Bill Finnegan can tell you what that means. It means that she leads with her right foot, which is particularly important on this wave because it creates such a terrifying, huge barrel. It helps her get a lot of speed facing the wave instead of having her back to it. Our longtime listeners will know

That I went surfing on the radio. On the radio? With Bill Finnegan. You mean you went surfing on the radio waves? As we are now? No, I got into it. But let me just say the most difficult physical aspect of the kind of surfing I did was getting into the wetsuit, about which I will not go on about. And it was...

It was a semi-catastrophe, I'll put it that way. Why am I not surprised? Louisa, what are you actually looking forward to seeing in the Olympics? What's the big sport for you? I mean, I always love the, I'm kind of like a normal person. I like the gymnastics. I like the swimming. I want to see Katie Ledecky swim like seven laps ahead of everyone else with a cup of chocolate milk and balance the top of her head.

But I will also, let's not forget track and field, which is, you know, basically the, I will cry at least once when someone does something amazing because I am moved by the Olympic spirit and, you know, really fast, charismatic people. Louisa Thomas, thanks so much. Thank you. Louisa Thomas is writing about the Olympic Games at newyorker.com. And you can be sure I'll be following the basketball, especially men's and women's very, very closely.

I'm David Remnick, and that's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of TuneArts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, Ursula Sommer, and Alicia Zuckerman. With guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Parrish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deket. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trina Endowment Fund. Have a question or need how-to advice? Just ask Meta AI.

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