Different times mean different approaches on race
29 Jan 2021 US Vice President Kamala Harris watches as President Joe Biden signs executive orders on his racial equity agenda at the White House in Washington on Tuesday. Reuters
Noah Bierman,
Tribune News Service
Barack Obama campaigned for president in 2008 with explicit advice from his inner circle to downplay “any topic that might be labeled racial grievance” or to “do anything that would box me in as ‘the Black candidate,’” he wrote in his recent memoir.
Just over a dozen years later, Vice President Kamala Harris was ushered into the White House by the drumline of historically Black Howard University, her alma mater, to be the second in command of an administration that has made closing the racial wealth gap one of four policy “pillars.”
Enter email address You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
Distinctions in tone, emphasis and perception between the nation’s first Black president and its first Black vice president are not easy to draw. Obama spoke personally and poignantly about the nation’s troubled racial history including in a 2008 Philadelphia speech sparked by controversy over his pastor and Harris similarly has been able to interpret her personal encounters with the country’s racial divide for non-Black audiences.
Advertisement
Yet many see Harris as willing to lean harder into her public identity as a Black woman and to place societal racial gaps higher on her agenda. That is widely interpreted as an important marker in the country’s movement, spurred by a Trump presidency that placed white racial grievance at its center, by a summer of nationwide protests over the abuse of Black people in the criminal justice system and by a Capitol siege this m