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Claude A. Clegg III, Lyle V. Jones Distinguished Professor at Chapel Hill, wrote a book on the Obama presidency.
Claude A. Clegg III
In their insults aimed at the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, some congressional Republicans have used three letters often bandied about in higher education these days: DEI, for diversity, equity and inclusion. They’ve called Harris—who is simultaneously the nation’s first Black, first Asian American and first female vice president—a “DEI hire.”
Donald Trump, for his part, has questioned Harris’s racial identity. Attacks focusing on her race or sex are likely to continue as the election approaches. To learn more about what has, and hasn’t, changed since Barack Obama was elected the country’s first Black president in 2008, Inside Higher Ed spoke via phone earlier this month with Claude A. Clegg III, the Lyle V. Jones Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama (John Hopkins University Press). Clegg holds a joint appointment in the Chapel Hill history department and the African, African American and diaspora studies department. His answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You wrote a book on the Obama presidency. How did or didn’t his victories and time in office lead to Trump’s election, Biden’s election and now Harris’s nomination?
A: Obama was possible because of a certain demographic change that’s taken place—is still taking place—in which you have a larger number of people of color, minorities in this country.
The Republican brand had been damaged pretty severely by George W. Bush in terms of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an economy in free fall by 2008, so there was this confluence of things.
Obama mastered social media and also the internet … and he turned out to be a formidable candidate.
Trump is a backlash.
His, of course, claim to fame, rise to prominence in the Republican Party has everything to do with his claim that President Obama was not only unfit for the office, but ineligible for the office, [that] he wasn’t even born in this country … and also I think some real angst among a good portion of the American population in terms of being left out of the economy—not seeing themselves, their values reflected in the political system.
Biden, he’s the sort of self-proclaimed antidote to Trump and Trumpism.
Q: What do you find most striking about the current race, and what do you think pundits and journalists aren’t paying enough attention to?
A: You have a woman of color, a woman of South Asian and Black ancestry who has as strong a pedigree as a candidate for the presidency as anyone. She was elected to be the attorney general of the most populous state in the country, California, and then elected to be the U.S. senator from that same state; she has served as vice president.
She’s about 20 years younger than Mr. Trump as well, so just the juxtaposition of those two candidates is very striking. And I think it says more than a thousand words about our particular moment that both of those two candidates are competitive for the job of president.
Under the whole DEI language is the notion that this is a white male job, and if you’re not a white male, then you’re not really qualified.
Other things are getting underemphasized … the people who are eclipsing the baby boomers and the kinds of things that they would privilege in terms of their concerns. Things such as climate change, things such as affordability of education … also, Gaza.
This election is going to be decided by thousands of votes, not millions of votes, in a handful of swing states … the antiwar vote could cost you the election.
I think that [Harris] is paying very close attention to the folks that were critical of the conduct of the war in Gaza, the college campus folks who had all of these protests.
Q: How have racial politics changed since Obama’s presidency, and how will that affect the race between Harris and Trump?
A: The similarities are striking. You have two candidates who are former U.S. senators from blue states, mixed-race folks both of them, Harris and Obama, very unique narratives about the American dream and what’s possible, rising to the highest ranks … but they are running in somewhat different times. Harris is running after Obama, so I think it’s easier to conceive of her possibly as president than if there had never been an Obama.
Because there was a Hillary Clinton, I think we can imagine a woman as a major party candidate for the office. Although she did not win in 2016, she won the most votes.
[Obama] faced the same sort of “othering” approach or playbook that Kamala Harris is facing now. [With] Obama there are those who made sure they mentioned his entire name when he was running in 2008—Barack Hussein Obama—and they were questioning his race.
Kamala Harris is facing some of that—the purposeful mispronunciation of her name by many Republicans at the recent Republican National Convention, this making of her as an other, the mispronunciation of the name to make it sound more foreign.
And it plays perhaps even better in an environment where anti-immigrant sentiment is flourishing, and her parents were immigrants to the United States.
Q: At the recent National Association of Black Journalists convention, Trump said he didn’t know Harris “was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.” What are your thoughts on Trump’s questioning how Harris identifies herself?
A: She’s always embraced that part of her identity, even since she was a little girl. She went to an HBCU, Howard University; she belongs to a Black sorority; and she has always identified herself as both Black and South Asian.
I think he is appealing to Black voters who might be open to the notion that she uses Black identity in a sort of political, pragmatic way, and she’s not really invested in it.
Or it’s the appeal to his base of voters, which is primarily [a] white, working-class, rural base of voters and, again, this further othering of her.
Q: Harris does have a diverse racial identity. Obama’s identity is also diverse, but in a different way: his mother was white and, like all other presidents have been, he’s a man. How do you think Harris’s own identity, including her being a woman, will make it easier or more difficult for her to win?
A: I think the woman part is huge in terms of what makes her different from Obama. I think that in this moment, where reproductive rights are so front and center, I think that only plays to the advantage of the Democrats.
I’m thinking about JD Vance and his cat ladies comment … the sort of retrograde thinking about women and childless individuals and some other things, too, are probably a net positive for her.
But at the same time, [it’s] not all that beneficial to be running as the first woman who might possibly be president because of all of the misogyny.
No one was talking about George Washington, our first president, who had no biological children, being a cat lady or anything like that.
Q: Obama, when he was running and in office, seemed to avoid talking about race. But since he left office, George Floyd was murdered and DEI programs—and backlash to them—spread throughout universities and other parts of society. Some Republicans have now called Harris a “DEI hire.” What do you make of this line of attack, and will Harris, like Obama, avoid talking about race during her campaign—or is that even an option for her like it was for Obama?
A: To use [DEI] as a smear, I think the purpose is to more or less racialize the candidate or use it to other the candidate as a person who is unqualified for the job … no one is taking to task JD Vance for only being in the Senate for two years.
I think the whole DEI discourse around her is racial and, to a certain degree, sexist dog whistling to say that this is not a Black woman’s—this is not a woman of color’s—job.
Q: If Harris wins, do you expect Trumpism and the MAGA movement to fade away, or do you expect an even stronger Tea Party– or MAGA-type wave in response?
A: I think we will have multiple Americas and multiple visions of what it means to be America … as a national movement that’s able to capture the White House—I don’t know about that if Trump loses this time.
I think that’s one of those wait-and-sees, whether you can have Trumpism without Trump or whether the Republican Party has some reckoning.
