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‘Cultural Incompetence’ Dogs Harris Coverage

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Many Don’t ‘Get’ Her Status as a Black, Asian Woman

Homepage photo: Vice President Kamala Harris is interviewed by members of the National Association of Black Journalists Sept. 17 at WHYY studios in Philadelphia. (Credit: Jason Miccolo Johnson/NABJ)

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Vice President Kamala Harris is interviewed Sept. 17 by, from left, Tonya Mosley of NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Eugene Daniels of Politico and Gerran Keith Gaynor of theGrio, members of the National Association of Black Journalists,  at WHYY studios in Philadelphia. (Credit: Jason Miccolo Johnson/NABJ)

Many Don’t ‘Get’ Her Status as a Black, Asian Woman

News coverage of Vice President Kamala Harris and her bid for the presidency is hampered by the “cultural incompetence” of journalists who don’t understand or acknowledge the political skill it took for a Black and South Asian woman to reach the level she has, according to reporters who discussed the Democratic presidential nominee last week at the Journal-isms Roundtable.

Overall, the press has failed to pay sufficient attention to her background, her time as vice president and how the priorities she’s outlined reflect her own experience as a woman, a former prosecutor and a person of color, said the reporters, themselves of color and who have all covered Harris.

“Let’s not be too cerebral with this,” said April Ryan, the veteran White House reporter now writing for theGrio. “She is a Black woman in a racist America. And that’s all I’m gonna say.”

Brakkton Booker, who reports for Politico, said, “My business does not give her credit for being a tactful politician.

“You don’t get this way as a Black woman married to a white guy without . . . having the blueprint of how to play this correctly, ’cause the landmines are too many . . . for her to get this far without being savvy about how she’s gonna go and play the hand that she’s given.

“If our business keeps writing about her laughter, that is a way to . . . undercut her as how skillful she is, right. She may win the presidency [with] the shortest amount of runway in modern American history. But we’re not talking about that.”

Nii-Quartelai Quartey, Ed.D., a talk show host at KBLA in Los Angeles, was so taken by Harris as he joined her 2023 trip to Africa that he wrote a book about it, “Kamala, The Motherland and Me.”

“It’s important to note that for a long time, really, for most of her career, Vice President Harris has been sort of a perpetual outsider,” Quartey said.

“I think you cover people who are outsiders, who are, repeat, outsiders, differently than you cover insiders.

“We’ll talk about her, you know, as a proud HBCU alum, as an AKA, and that’s it,” he continued, referring to historically Black colleges and universities and the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

“But we don’t talk enough about her point of origin. What was happening in Oakland, California, what was happening in the San Francisco Bay Area during her coming-of-age years.

“And those early years where she worked in the Alameda County prosecutor’s office. What was happening that might have informed, that might have shaped her worldview. I’m also a native of the Bay Area, and so I have a great appreciation for that part of the world and for the convergence of so many social justice movements — anti-war movement, women’s liberation movement, Black Panthers movement, gay rights movement . . . “

Amy Alexander, who wrote a piece for HuffPost about the explosion of female politicians in California while Harris was coming into her own, noted the surprise that greeted Harris’ disclosures that she owns a gun.

“I’ve never seen anyone on the record ask her about the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, and Harvey Milk getting assassinated in their offices” in 1978, Alexander said, “and what, how she thinks about that. . . . They were shot by a crazy white man, angry white man.”

Moreover, given the threats that district attorneys receive and the California standard that “your home is your castle,” is it that surprising that prosecutors would seek to protect themselves with guns?

This Journal-isms Roundtable took place on Sept. 22, the first day of autumn. It was one of the richest public conversations to be had anywhere on Harris’ candidacy. Darlene Superville, White House reporter for the Associated Press, and Errin Haines of The 19th News, who has covered Harris since she ran for president in 2020, rounded out the panel.

Forty-six people were on the Zoom call, 21 watched on Facebook, and 293 had viewed the YouTube video by Sept. 29. The video is embedded above.

Not all the conversation was pro-Harris or even about her. Gilbert Bailon, executive editor of WBZ public radio in Chicago, asked whether, as Harris was being evaluated, Republican competitor Donald Trump was getting a pass on some of his more alarming proposals, and joined others in wondering aloud why so many Black and Latino men — 16 percent of Black men and 47 percent of Latino men in some polls — were supporting Trump. One answer was that these Trumpers are “low information voters.”

Phillip W.d. Martin of GBH public radio in Boston urged that the threat of authoritarianism not be forgotten. Hazel Trice Edney of the Trice Edney News Wire wondered whether, if Harris won, Black reporters would fear being shut down if they asked about race, as she said some feared under Barack Obama. The legendary Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who joined the group, received several shout-outs.  

Then there was the South Asian connection.

Emil Guillermo, a veteran Filipino American columnist, currently writes for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. He covered Harris when she was D.A. in the Bay Area in the early 2000s.

Guillermo faulted Harris for “how she has been reluctant to define herself as Asian all throughout her life. . . . I know people say she’s talking about it on Facebook. She talked about it at the DNC,” the Democratic National Convention. “But I point to the 2019 CNN Town Hall, when she had three opportunities to say she was Asian in the introduction to the 2020 campaign, and she did not. She could not do it then, could not do it, and then, now four years later. DNC. She talks about Mom. She always talked about [that] in social media, but not to the mainstream media.

“Asians love Kamala Harris,” he said. “They want to love Kamala Harris. If only she would love them back every now and then.”

Guillermo received pushback from others who said Harris indeed has mentioned her South Asian roots but is reluctant to discuss race at all, “because they will use it against her,” as Ryan said.

In fact, right-wing activist Laura Loomer, a former congressional candidate, said on social media this month that if Harris wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.”

Journalist Aziz Haniffa shares insights and behind-the-scenes moments from his interview with Kamala Harris during her campaign for California attorney general, a post she won in 2010. (Credit: YouTube)

Aziz Haniffa, for almost 40 years executive editor of India Abroad, which was the largest Indian American newspaper, said he had a different experience when he interviewed Harris in 2009, “just a few months before” she was running for state attorney general.

“She totally embraced her South Asianness in my interview,” Haniffa said.

“I have a feeling that in the early years it was just the fact that the Asian community, especially the South Asian, and the Indian American community had not embraced her as part Indian. . . .

“I remember her talking so much about her mother, how she would take her to India like at least once a year, walks with the grandfather, who was part of the India Independence movement, and I think a part of it, covering the South Asian American community, and writ large the Asian American community, part of their problem was some kind of a reverse racism that they had, that they didn’t want to embrace this African American woman as part South Asian because, let’s face it.

“When she was with her mom, and her mom was a trailblazer of sorts, but also a rebel of sorts, because she had married the Jamaican . . . they were part of the civil rights movement when they were both at Berkeley . . . the Indian American community and the South Asian American community didn’t embrace her mom either. . . . 

“The embrace . . . really came only after I think she was AG, and then, of course, was elected to the U.S. Senate.”

As a conversation among journalists, the complaint that Harris has not given enough news conferences was on the table.

Ryan cited a White House source who said that as vice president, Harris had given more than 300 interviews, many of them regional.

Haines, who said she has interviewed Harris more than any reporter since she was nominated for vice president, returned to the issue of “cultural competency,” agreeing with Alexander.

“Harris doesn’t get to where she is in American politics without being cautious and guarded — but you can’t really be either of those things if you want to be president,” Haines messaged the group. “Still, the white/male press corps does not have a great track record in terms of actually seeing her or her leadership, so why would she sit down with them only to have them not get her again?” Haines asked.

Superville spoke in practical terms.

“One of the things that some of us lost sight of is the fact that in July, the president literally surprised her by giving her [the top of] the ticket,” she said.

“And she had a number of things and a number of deadlines to meet. She had to kind of retool the campaign infrastructure into her own.

“Then she had to pivot into finding a vice presidential nominee. That process can take months. It was condensed down to three weeks.

“Immediately after she did that it was pivoting to the convention, and so on, and so on. So she’s now over some of those hurdles, and we’re now seeing her starting to give more interviews. And of course we all would love to talk to her, but her strategists are deploying whatever kind of strategy they think is suiting her the best and you know, hopefully, we’ll all get to talk to her, but we’ll see.”

Harris’ 2023 trip to Africa was cited as an example of the cultural dissonance behind the phrase “cultural incompetence.”

“For the first Black woman vice president to go to Africa,” said Ryan. “For that to be suppressed. Something’s wrong there.”

Said Quartey, “I was really underwhelmed by a lot of the reporting about the trip. I thought it was one of the most underreported trips.

“And I thought, what a shame. . . . Vice President Harris accomplished a lot, right? Talking to our foreign allies about reorganizing debt. Addressing national security-related issues, shining a spotlight on some of the climate resilience work that’s afoot on the continent. Who knew that in places like Zambia they’re using AI-powered technology?

Idris Elba, fourth from left; Ghanaian rapper Black Sherif, Sheryl Lee Ralph, third from right; and other celebrities joined Vice President Kamala Harris in Ghana as she visited Vibration studios at the Freedomskatepark in Accra in March 2023. (Credit: Nipah Dennis/Okay Africa)

“To combat against climate change. Sheryl Lee Ralph and Idris Elba even joined us in Ghana for a leg of the tour to shine a light on some of the work afoot related to the creative economy. And so I touched on so many of these experiences in the book,” Quartey continued. “But I think it’s important that we decouple the vice president [from] the vice presidency,” which is often viewed strictly in ceremonial terms, despite the difference in the kind of person in the job.

Quartey added, “Recently I was at an event, and someone came up to me and said, ‘You know I’m on Chapter 3 of your book.’

“And they said, ‘Your book is a Kamala Harris myth buster.’ This was a brother that said this.

“And he said, as much as they try to make it seem as if she’s not like us, already, reading your book, it feels like she’s actually more like us than I thought.”

Ryan compared coverage of the Harris trip to that given President George W. Bush in 2003 when he and other top officials went to the continent. “George W. Bush has been considered the president who did more for Africa than any other president,” but the coverage then was also underwhelming, Ryan said.

Domestically, one can see the equivalence in the amount of attention given topics of importance to Black women, she added, such as Harris’ plans to address Black maternal death rates. Black women in the U.S. have consistently experienced higher maternal mortality rates — typically between two to four times higher — than other demographics.

“You don’t hear anybody talking about that anymore,” Ryan said. “That’s a big thing. I almost died twice having children.”

That led Ryan to a larger point about the need for diversity among journalists.

*We are there to give the texture and the context that the others can’t,” Ryan said. “We are there because they don’t know us, but we gotta know them.”

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