Republicans go DEI on Kamala Harris at their own peril

When Republicans call Vice President Kamala Harris a DEI hire, what they really want to say is a whole lot worse.

But they dare not. So instead, they go DEI on the VP.

In their minds, DEI — which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion — equals not qualified. It is the new woke, which replaced CRT (critical race theory), which took over for affirmative action.

Immediately after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in Baltimore, guess what got blamed? DEI. And when a panel blew out midflight during an Alaskan Airlines flight last winter, right-wing activists and trolls blamed DEI for that as well.

Now they’re saying Harris is the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency only because of her race and sex — not despite it.

On Wednesday, Trump was asked if he thought that calling Harris a DEI hire was acceptable and if he believed that she’s only on the ticket because she’s a Black woman. Instead of condemning the trolling, he added fuel to it by implying that she identifies as Black for political purposes.

“I’ve known her a long time indirectly … she was always of Indian heritage,” he said during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago. “And she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black.”

He added, “So I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black?”

You’d think he’d pull back after that but he didn’t. Trump kept digging.

After Rachel Scott of ABC News pointed out that Harris has always identified as African American and had attended a historically Black college, he responded that he respects both racial groups but then claimed Harris does not. “She was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn,” Trump said in a mocking manner. “She became a Black person.”

It’s infuriating to watch.

As an African American woman, all of this hits home.

I’ve been called a DEI hire. An affirmative action hire. You name it. It used to really bug me when someone would assume that I got a particular job because of my skin color as opposed to my skills, work history, and education.

When I see it happening with Harris, it gets me mad all over again.

They do it because she’s not white.

They do it because she’s a woman.

According to a 2023 Pew study, most Americans recognize that female politicians have it harder than male politicians such as JD Vance, former President Donald Trump’s running mate.

He’s white.

He’s male.

He fits the demographic of almost every other vice presidential candidate in the history of the country besides Harris.

So, that works for the GOP. They save their nitpicking for Harris and claim ad nauseam that she’s not qualified, despite her spending the last four years serving as vice president under Joe Biden.

They ignore her four years in the U.S. Senate.

They ignore the fact that she successfully served two terms as state attorney general of California.

They ignore the fact that she served two terms as district attorney of San Francisco.

What they won’t ignore, however, is the fact that she’s a woman and the fact that no other woman has successfully vied for our nation’s top job.

Harris’ late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was born in India. Her father — Donald Jasper Harris, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University — was a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Jamaica.

For conservatives, these two things alone are enough to disqualify her from becoming America’s 47th president.

Neanderthals remain convinced that the presidency is a man’s job — not that they’ll openly admit it. Instead, they try to cloak their bigotry. They point to Biden’s statements about choosing a female running mate to bolster their argument that Harris is a DEI hire.

But I don’t recall the same outrage when the late Sen. John McCain picked former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin back in 2008. The GOP’s hypocrisy is selective and glaring.

Meanwhile, Trump is also going after Harris the way chauvinistic bigots always demean women by implying we are somehow “crazy” or “nuts.”

I recently listened to an MSNBC interview of five female voters in Green Bay, Wis., who talked about why they wouldn’t support Harris. One of the women even went so far as to brand Harris as “an idiot.” When the interviewer asked why she would say that, she responded, “Because she hasn’t done anything in the time that she’s had.”

Then the woman added, “She’s not real smart. That’s my opinion.”

I guess that’s easier than recognizing that for a woman to have achieved what Harris has, particularly a woman of color, she has to be at least twice as good as a male candidate. That’s a message I learned while attending Howard University. I know that Harris, who also graduated from this historically Black institution, got that message, too. Harris wouldn’t have gotten as far as she has without it.

Rep. Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.) who also recently called Harris a “DEI hire,” knows that’s what it takes, too. Seeing Harris excel, despite all of the roadblocks intentionally set in the way of ambitious career women and people of color like her, enrages people like him. So they try to knock her down. The easiest way is to go after two things she can’t change. Her race and ethnicity.

Because that’s basically all they’ve got.

“She brought to light that sex and race have to be addressed in politics,” pointed out Sheila Armstrong, a Philly-based Black Republican who intends to vote for Trump in November. “This goes with the territory.”

That may well be, but although I continue to find it maddening, I hope Republicans don’t listen to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s admonitions to tone down the attacks on Harris’ sex and race.

It’s a losing tactic that’s going to cost them big time.