Facts cannot be racist. But that hasn’t stopped many liberal media figures and Democratic politicians from trying to insist otherwise after one conservative writer dared to point out what we all know about Vice President Kamala Harris : She wouldn’t be where she is now without the movement for DEI , also known as diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In an article that went viral, Charles Gasparino wrote that if she is successfully put forward as President Joe Biden’s successor, Harris will be “the country’s first DEI president.” Suffice it to say, this did not go over well.
Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) tweeted out the headline and said, “This is straight-up racist.”
Meanwhile, the account “Racism Watch Dog” shared the article and said , “Bark bark bark,” in a post that 4.7 million people have seen.
Another viral tweet accused the article of “finding a way to spell the nword with only 3 characters.”
You get the idea: How dare conservatives label Kamala Harris a diversity pick. That’s obviously racist and hateful!
There’s just one problem, however. It is a fact that Harris was selected to be Biden’s vice president in part due to her race and gender. It is a fact that if she had been a white male but otherwise remained a California senator, Harris never would’ve been selected as his running mate.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask Biden. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden openly said, in explicit terms , that he was only considering women to be his vice president, and he strongly implied that he would favor a woman of color.
That’s right: We know for a fact that, but for her gender, Harris never would’ve been selected as vice president. (And if not for that, she certainly wouldn’t be at the forefront of the conversation for a potential Biden replacement.) So, to call her a diversity or “DEI” pick is not an opinion that can be characterized as racist: It is an observation of a fact.
When I pointed this out on X, many of the same liberals and progressives got upset with me as well.
But a fact that upsets people continues to be a fact. And none of their counterarguments change the fact that Harris, no matter how one feels about it, owes her current position in part to the Democrats’ blatant identity politics and openly discriminatory pursuit of diversity.
Some critics pointed out that Harris isn’t unqualified for vice president, arguing that as a former senator and state attorney general, she has similar qualifications to past vice presidential picks, such as Biden when he served under President Barack Obama. Yet this is something of a non sequitur because to say that Harris was a diversity selection is not to say she’s totally unqualified for the job.
For example, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is objectively a “diversity pick” because Biden openly said he was only considering black women for the job. Yet Jackson is also eminently qualified for the position — she was simply elevated above others due to her immutable characteristics. These two things can and do coexist with regularity.
DEI picks rarely, if ever, result in a situation where someone totally unqualified is picked for a job. But someone is a diversity hire if, but for her immutable characteristics, she would not have been given the role under a strictly meritocratic selection. And that is almost certainly the case for Harris. After all, according to Biden himself, she was selected through a process in which more than half of the alternatives, males, were ruled out due to their gender and white females were seemingly disfavored. That left only her and a handful of other minority women who were high-ranking Democratic officials from which Biden could choose.
And beyond her identity, Harris didn’t add much to the ticket. She wasn’t from a swing state. She had never won a competitive election against a Republican. She wasn’t popular with the Democratic base, having failed horrifically in her own presidential bid. She wasn’t even popular in the primary with black voters, a group from whom Biden already had strong support. And she was prone to cringeworthy moments and had the campaign trail charisma of a wet towel.
Harris’s main “value add” for Biden’s ticket was that she was a woman of color. We all knew it then, and we all know it now.
Another counterargument is that vice presidents are often selected due to factors not directly related to merit. That may be true, but it shouldn’t be. And it doesn’t make racial favoritism any less morally detestable. It also doesn’t make the charge that Harris is a DEI pick less true. If anything, it just offers context to better understand the significance of this truth.
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So, too, some critics have yelled, “But Trump!”, as they are wont to do, and they have pointed out that President Donald Trump did something similar when he appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett after promising to appoint a woman. Yet this whataboutism isn’t a refutation of the actual charge. It just means that Barrett was also a DEI pick, as some acknowledged at the time. (If their point was just that Republicans can be hypocrites, they’d have no argument from me!)
We simply cannot let Democrats and progressives make noticing facts they find inconvenient off-limits by throwing around false charges of racism. No matter how hard some on the Left insist, facts can never be racist, and the moment we cave to that ridiculous framing, we lose the ability to discuss the truth and cede the political conversation to whoever is willing to cry “victim” the loudest.
Brad Polumbo ( @Brad_Polumbo ) is an independent journalist, YouTuber , and a co-founder of BASEDPolitics.
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