One of the things that has been pretty darn impressive about the candidacy of Kamala Harris is how she’s avoided making her sex or gender an issue. Granted, there are plenty of others to do it for her, not the least of whom is the orange guy claiming she magically became black one day, but Harris can’t be blamed for what others say or do. Still, John McWhorter raises a very interesting point that I hadn’t considered, and McWhorter is likely one of the very few people in media who could pull it off.

‘Joy’ Is a Euphemism for a Word No One Wants to Say Out Loud

Don’t blame him for the improper use of single quotation marks. He doesn’t write the headlines and the Times fired most of their editors years ago, leaving it to interns and the terminally challenged to deal with grammar and punctuation. But I digress.

Certainly, part of the joy comes from Democrats’ relief at having a candidate who is mentally alert and has at least a chance of winning the election. But that isn’t all of it, and some thought experiments show why.

McWhorter posits that had Biden been replaced with a white man, or even a white woman, there would be relief, but not irrational exuberance. But Harris?

That’s because a good deal of the joy people keep talking about is a result of one fact: that Harris is Black.

And I don’t mean only the joy among Black people. I mean the instant and torrential elation across the Democratic board — memes, thumbs up from celebrities, “White Women for Kamala” and such. Before she had even laid out a program of any kind. Beyond a few sound bites, she still has barely spoken to the public without a teleprompter.

The night before, Harris gave her first interview to CNN’s Dana Bash. It was, as far as anyone can tell, uneventful and uninformative. She made no major gaffes, but replied with empty talking points that gave her adversary nothing hard to attack while giving those who await her earning their vote nothing to show she deserves to be president.

I’m hopeful about what she will show us, but let’s face it, nothing about Harris just now justifies her being treated as some kind of once-in-a-generation phenom or savior. This is not about substance, but optics. Harris is being received on the basis of a category she fits into rather than who she is as an individual. The thing sweeping so many people up is the idea that her being Black — and a Black woman at that — would in some resonant way shape her presidency. That it would be somehow significant that the president “looks like America.” That Harris’ Blackness would be a meaningful part of “not going back.”

But we have been here before. Or at least I have.

McWhorter launches into the disappointment of Barack Obama’s presidency.

In the run-up to the election of 2008, I was enchanted with the idea that Barack Obama’s Blackness offered some kind of serious promise. I thought the Obamas’ presence in the White House would help to normalize Black success and power in Americans’ eyes. I thought it would temper what I regard as a tendency to overplay the power of racism in modern America and discount the massive progress we have made on the issue.

That didn’t work out. The Obamas were barely unpacked at the White House when the wise word came from legions of the writerly class that the election of a Black man didn’t mean that America was “postracial.”

Was that correct, or was McWhorter paying too much attention to the writerly class rather than the thinkerly class? Perhaps the problem wasn’t that the Obamas didn’t normalize black success, not to mention black intelligence, tenacity, graciousness and a host of other virtues, but that the acknowledgement of Barack (and Michelle, lest we underestimate the value of her influence) Obama’s success would have eviscerated a really good excuse for those who failed to achieve much with their lives.

Granted, not everyone is going to be president, but that’s not the point of America. The point is that anyone can grow up to be president. That includes a black man and, yes, a black woman. But regardless of race or gender, the person who will be president still has to prove they deserve our vote, even if the only alternative is untenable under any circumstances.