With just a month left until the US presidential elections, no one is working as hard as Kamala Harris’s social media team trying to portray her as the latest girl boss in American politics. Portraying that there is nothing quite as girl boss as her deplorable prosecution record as district attorney, her role in police brutality and her complicity in the genocide in Gaza.
Since Harris announced she would be running in the presidential race in early July, her campaign has been received millions from Silicon Valley, with the likes of Microsoft and other online conglomerates backing her. With Harris proving seemingly unpopular amongst older generations who would be more inclined to follow mainstream American news outlets like FOX News, her campaign has been explicitly targeting younger generations online, most notably Gen Z.
The ’good vibes’ candidate
The Harris campaign is pouring millions of dollars into getting content creators and influencers from online platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Tiktok to endorse her, and it all reeks of desperation.
Such online conduct isn’t new, comparable to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign where he used the ‘political consulting firm’ Cambridge Analytica to spread disinformation about his opponent, as well as himself, and further racist rhetoric online to sway the election.
Nothing gets liberal celebrities as politically motivated as a politician whose campaign is over reliant on identity politics, offers zero change through their proposed policies and who will sustain a status quo that benefits their privilege.
British pop singer Charli XCX’s latest mediocre album entitled Brat took over the internet this summer, with the singer infamously tweeting “Kamala IS brat”. Harris’s social media team quickly jumped on the ‘BRAT’ bandwagon, creating memes and online content around the album.
Charli XCX’s interpretation of the word ‘brat’ refers to her ‘unapologetic, messy, brash, it-girl, and anti clean-girl aesthetic’, whatever that means. However, the way in which Harris’s campaigning team milked that tweet for all it was worth, was less about ‘anti clean girl aesthetic’ and more about washing over Harris’s atrocious political past, her problematic political positions and bringing absolutely nothing progressive to the presidential table.
Harris’s campaign is solely running on ‘good vibes’ and her being a woman of colour. The Democrats are trading in offering actual progressive politics in exchange for a token candidate fuelled by identity politics.
Limited political vision
Pro-Palestine critics of Harris have faced backlash after declaring they won’t be voting for Harris or Trump, over her complicity in genocide and his staunch pro-Israel stance. They have been criticised for making the election about a ‘single issue’. Like genocide isn’t a big enough problem to care about, especially as it enflames tensions all around the world and is being funded by US tax dollars. Money that could be better used to deal with the many other issues plaguing American society, including homelessness, hunger and lack of accessible healthcare.
Harris’s past as both District Attorney and Attorney General of San Francisco is reason enough to not trust her in a greater position of power. In these years she increased prosecutions and convictions for misdemeanours, pursued the arrest of parents for school truancies and fought to keep prisoners in overcrowded prisons in the interest of the cheap labour they sustained.
Looking more closely at specific cases, her pursuing countless arrests of innocent people such as Jamal Trulove are even more worrying revelations about the woman that could potentially become President. Trulove was wrongfully convicted of murder for which Harris was prosecutor. He was acquitted years later due to police fabricating evidence against him and was paid $13.3 million by the state.
Sheree Peoples, a single mother of a child with sickle cell anaemia, was jailed under the truancy laws that Harris enacted, giving police the power to arrest parents whose children miss school. Peoples was jailed and forced to pay a $2,500 fine for taking her child to hospital appointments.
Harris has also defended the death penalty, the use of which has been disproportionately used against innocent people of colour. Just weeks ago we saw the state sanctioned execution of Marcellus Williams, despite thousands supporting his appeal after finding racism within the same jury that found him guilty, as well as the mishandling of forensic evidence.
Identity politics
For a woman of colour, solely running on her racial identity to get elected, she has spent more time criminalising, arresting and sentencing to death, people of colour, than elevating their quality of life or combating the racism they face.
She has overseen police brutality routinely go unpunished, has withheld support of special investigations of police shootings as district attorney, and during her time as VP, had the highest record of police shootings in the country.
Harris is also a proud recipient of AIPAC money and has not wavered in her support of Israel for the past year of genocide that they have unleashed onto Palestinians. Furthermore, in her time as VP, the US has given more military aid to Israel than any other American administration. That not only makes you complicit, it effectively makes you an accomplice to genocide.
In the run up to the election, criticism of Harris is being seen as support of Trump, as she is seen as the ‘lesser of two evils’. In reality, they are equal to each other when it comes to the interests they will serve: to sustain the violent, settler colonial, imperialist, and capitalist status quo America thrives off. The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is their names. No matter which party gets elected, thousands of Americans will remain homeless, people of colour will still be victims of police brutality, and the government will continue supporting Israel.
The only thing that changes every four years is the face we pin the perpetual injustice that continues to fuel the US. It doesn’t matter who the Democrats or Republicans churn out next, it's the corrupt system that will never provide any meaningful change that must be dismantled.
Harris isn’t progressive, decolonisation, public ownership, police abolition, indigenous sovereignty are. Unfortunately, none of these will be on the ballot paper, and that’s the real problem.
Farrah Koutteineh is the founder of KEY48 - a voluntary collective calling for the immediate right of return of over 7.4 million Palestinian refugees. Koutteineh is also a political activist focusing on intersectional activism including, the Decolonise Palestine movement, indigenous people's rights, anti-establishment movement, women's rights and climate justice.
Follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @key48return
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