The Polemics of Authenticity: Is Kamala Harris Black enough? Is J.D. Vance really a hillbilly?
In today’s guest post, John Wood Jr. boldly highlights the limits of political critique based on authenticity, focusing on Kamala Harris and J.D. Vance. John is the National Ambassador of Braver Angels, an organization with chapters across the U.S. that facilitates civic engagement on controversial issues and interpersonal connections among Americans across political divides. In the conclusion of the piece, he explains a better basis for evaluating leadership than a politics of identity.
Check out his essay below and John’s brilliant and soulful guest appearance on Straight Ahead: The Omni-American Podcast.
Greg, John Wood Jr., and Aryeh Tepper
Authenticity, or the perception thereof, has long been an important dynamic of politics. Where a candidate is from, what groups of people they identify with, and how persuasively can make a difference in terms of people's willingness to listen to that individual, to get out and organize for them and vote, and how enthusiastically they do so. This is a natural thing. It is reasonable to believe that a candidate who can relate, in whatever measure, to my life experience or who feels a connection to my particular state, class, or group might show more dedication to representing my interests if he or she actually finds their way into office.
As understandable a way to think as this is, it is also an instinct that invites a certain pettiness in our political discourse as we find ourselves engaged in the polemics of authenticity. This has been driven home to me of late with questions surrounding the candidacies of Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump's vice-presidential pick Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio.
In an appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump took aim at Kamala Harris' racial credibility, saying, "I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don't know, is she Indian or is she Black?"
Not long before, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, a leading candidate to join the Harris ticket as Democratic vice-presidential nominee, berated J.D. Vance's claimed connection to Kentucky: "I want the American people to know what a Kentuckian is and what they look like. Cause let me just tell you, J.D. Vance isn't from here."
Harris and Vance each have their own perceived authenticity issues when it comes to their backgrounds. Kamala Harris would be the first Black woman president of the United States, attended and was a sorority sister at an HBCU, but as the daughter of an Indian woman and a Jamaican man, one who did not live a traditional African-American upbringing, she has been accused of being unrepresentative of Black [American] culture.
J.D. Vance's story of having grown up in Appalachian poverty in Middletown, Ohio, with family roots in Kentucky, is one that has been celebrated in cinema and book reviews ever since the success of his best-selling autobiography Hillbilly Elegy. Even so, Vance, who ultimately would go on to an Ivy League education and a career far removed from these humble origins, has faced criticisms of his own portrayal of his roots and the cultural challenges of poor white Americans in the Rust Belt and the Appalachian south.
But Harris has never claimed to have lived the 'typical' Black experience in America, nor has Vance claimed to have grown up day to day in Kentucky. As a person of mixed heritage and multiple socio-economic environments in my own upbringing, I feel a certain need to speak in defense of the complicated reality of the backgrounds that many Americans trail behind them, often spanning different groups and geographies. Does it make a person inauthentic to claim association with more than one place and more than one group of people?
This, of course, is for the American people to decide. But as we do so, perhaps we will also remember that the core test of leadership in America is less where one is coming from and more where one is prepared to lead us. And that is a question of character, record, and ideas more than it is merely a matter of where we draw our origins from.
—John Wood Jr., National Ambassador, Braver Angels