Has Kamala Harris been Joe Biden's co-president?

The correct answer to that is no.

The Vice President has never been seen as a co-president. The US Constitution gives the vice president no executive powers and only the legislative power of presiding over the senate. Donald Trump tried to claim there was real power vested in that position, but he was wrong, it's merely ceremonial. This is how Google describes the "power of the vice president":

The Constitution names the vice president of the United States as the president of the Senate. In addition to serving as presiding officer, the vice president has the sole power to break a tie vote in the Senate and formally presides over the receiving and counting of electoral ballots cast in presidential elections.

The vice president has no executive powers at all, and no role in the military chain of command, which flows from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the heads of the various services, bypassing the vice president entirely. And this is where state power really resides—in the control of the instruments of  state violence. 

 According to whitehouse.gov:

The primary responsibility of the Vice President of the United States is to be ready at a moment’s notice to assume the Presidency if the President is unable to perform his or her duties.

This would require that the Veep be read-in on everything the president is doing, but it doesn't require input from Veep into anything the president is doing. Historically, vice presidents have had no control and very little influence over the policies of their presidents. So, clearly, the vice president is not a co-president, and there's no real basis for treating Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's co-president. 

Never in a thousand years did I see myself writing a blog post arguing that the vice president is not a co-president, but this is the silly season and ever since Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the 2024 Democratic nominee, at least two groups have found it necessary, or convenient, to treat Kamala Harris as Biden's co-president so that she can be held equally responsible for all the supposed evil he has done.

One group is Trump, and his supporters, obviously. They've spent years building a campaign against Biden. Trump, himself, complains they've spent "hundreds of millions" attacking Biden, before "they" pulled the switch. They'd like to be able to use as much of that as they can against Harris—although they haven't been able to come up with a Hunter angle yet. Still, it's very convenient for them to be able to blame Harris for everything they blamed Biden for. That way they don't have to change their playbook very much, and they can recycle all the old material. Who cares if it really equally applies to Harris? Their job is getting Trump elected, and any mud that might stick to Harris will do, so for all intent and purposes, they have named Kamala Harris Joe Biden's co-president over the last three and a half years.

The other group is those now protesting for Palestine outside of the DNC in Chicago AND are seamlessly replacing their previous invocations against "Genocide Joe" with chats against "Killer Kamala." 

Joe Biden, because he had command authority over all military aid flowing to Israel, because he directed the US military to defend Israel while it was assaulting Gaza, and because he casts the US veto to block any meaningful UN action, while more than 40 thousand Palestinians were massacred, may have well earned the label "Genocide Joe."  But what has the vice president done to be called a killer? Is everyone in Biden's cabinet also a killer? Everyone in the government? Everyone in the military? On account of what the US has done for Israel? Or is it just convenient for the campist-led pro-Palestine movement to come up with a catchy new label for Harris, "Killer Kamala," recycle the old material, and treat her as though she has been Biden's co-president, and equally responsible for his genocidal Gaza policies.

Harris has her own views on Gaza, and we got a rare window into them through her "Remarks by Vice President Harris Following Meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel". In them she gave perhaps the strongest condemnation by any major US politician of what Israel is doing in Gaza:

I also expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians.  And I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there, with over 2 million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity.

What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating — the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time.  We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies.  We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering.  And I will not be silent.

Over at Al Jazeera, commentators were ecstatic! While they have been reporting on these conditions for months, it was the first time they had heard anything like this from a spokesperson for the US government—and she said this to Netanyahu's face! Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane said.

“She talked about the number of starvations. The number of people who are food insecure. The number of people who have had to move several times. She talked about seeing pictures of dead children. You don’t see that in the US media. You don’t see it on the front pages of newspapers. Almost hardly at all. There is very little discussion about the plight of the people in Gaza.”

What Harris said certainly wasn't news to them, but they knew it would be news to millions of Americans who got their news on Israel-Gaza solely from US corporate media. Certainly, Biden never spoke out like this. To the "Killer Kamala" crowd it makes no difference. They've got their program and they're sticking to it.

Never mind that the other guy told Netanyahu "It has to get over with fast. ... Get your victory and get it over with," and promised to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again." Or that there is no split in his party over the question of uncritically supporting Israel no matter what it does. They will focus their anger at Harris, just as if she were Biden, and there is no daylight between them. 

With the Republicans, its easy to see why they want to use the same playbook against Harris as Biden because their goal remains the same—to elect Trump. It's not so easy to see why those protesting the suffering in Gaza are falling back on that same approach. There is a opportunist element in this "Uncommitted" movement that support it as a way to take votes away from Trump's opponent. They have backers in the Kremlin, the GOP, and other places where the advantages for Trump of this campaign are well understood. So, it's easy to see why they would follow the MAGA tactic of treating Harris as Biden's co-president. But what about those sincerely in the movement to stop the carnage in Gaza? Shouldn't they allow that Kamala Harris has not been Joe Biden's co-president, should be considered on her own merits, and may be a better choice than Donald Trump when the welfare of the people of Gaza is considered.

Clay Claiborne

20 August 2024 

On Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and how I "decided" to be Black

Mom, Dad & Me circa 1949

Recently, my sunset watching gang at Venice Beach had a gender reveal party for a pregnant couple, and we were all asked to bring baby pictures. The best one I could find was this picture of me as a toddler, sitting between my mother and father. As you can see, my father was quite dark, and my mother was fair skinned, which accounts for my medium shade.

I first became aware that I was black—and that this was a bad thing—three or four years after this photo was taken. 

I was born in 1948, and raised in Atlantic City, NJ, but my mother, and her family, were from Dudley, NC. Every summer we would drive down to spend a few weeks with the grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins in the South. That is where I first learned what it means to be black in America. I can still remember the shame and rage as if it was yesterday.

Mom had taken my younger brother, Cory, and me into Goldsboro, NC, the closest city. As we passed a Woolworths, my brother and I started clamoring for some ice cream, a regular treat from the Woolworths in Atlantic City, and my mom was forced to tell us that we couldn't get ice cream at this Woolworths because we were black! 

Every black child in America has endured a similar dark epiphany.

With her fair skin, straight brown hair, and green eyes, my mom could "pass" for white, and did so as a college student in Savannah, which meant that she didn't have to ride in the back of the bus, and probably could slip into Woolworths for an ice cream without being challenged—provided she was alone. But she couldn't do that with her children, her husband, or even her North Carolina family. So, other than those exceptional college years, she was black all of her life.

I could never "pass" for white, and neither could Kamala Harris. She could have told the bus driver or the people at Woolworths that she was Indian, or South Asian—and see how far that got her. They would have told her to get to the back of the bus and out of the store because as far as they were concerned, she was black. If she had insisted on her rights as another racial identity, the cops would have been called to show her just how black she was.

Trump & the NABJ

To a room full of black journalists, Donald Trump promoted the racist fairy tale that Harris had formerly identified as Indian or South Asian, and only recently decided to be black. This has been met with a flurry of responses showing that she identified as black as early as when she went to Howard University and joined AKA. That's bad news for me because I was one the few blacks in my freshman class at Washington University (St. Louis) and joined SDS because all the fraternities were white—but then, so was SDS, but at least it was radical.

All of these rebuttals showing that she has always identified as black miss the point, and that's the beauty of Trump's racist attack. He's positing racial identity as a personal choice, whereas for people of color, your racial identity is what white people say it is. That central fact seems to be missing from this whole dust up.

One difference between gender and race is that while gender, however you define it, represents an organic category, race is a completely synthetic one. It has no basis in biology. We are all one species. Grouping people by skin color makes about as much sense as grouping them by hair color, which would be our most prominent color identifier if we were still mostly covered by hair, as most mammals are. Instead, we adapted to the sunlight provided at different latitudes by allocating different melanin levels and types to adjust the bare skin to protect us while still producing the necessary vitamin D.

Since race is a completely synthetic category, your race has always been determined by what your white supremacist society says it is.

Keep in mind that the "white" race was invented in the mid to late 1600s, less than 400 years ago in the soon to be United States, and it was invented for purpose of making negroes a permanent slave class. Just consider how the label "white" first made it into Virginia laws. It was in a 1691 law titled “An act for suppressing outlying Slaves”:

And for prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may encrease in this dominion, as well by negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women, as by their unlawfull accompanying with one another, Be it enacted by the authoritie aforesaid, and it is hereby enacted, that for the time to come, whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a negroe, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever,...

That appears to be the first use of the label "white" to describe people in a law anywhere, but since most Europeans in the colonies had referred to themselves as English or Christian, "white" had to be introduced as a synonym for English or the reader might not know who they meant by "white." Please note also that this first ever use of the "white" label in law was to outlaw intermarriage between the newly created race and non-whites. Also note that negroes were not yet labeled "black," that only came several decades later. Even the Virginia Slave codes on 1705 makes no mention of the "black" label (no pun intended), although it uses the label "negro" 16 times, and the label "white" 9 times.

It has historically been a truth that a fair complexion was no guarantee of the ability to adopt a white identity. Initially, the Irish weren't considered white. The Italians neither. The Poles of Chicago didn't get the "right" to be "white" until the race riots of 1919. The view that Jews couldn't be white was the ideology behind the Holocaust, and the controversy over that question roils the extreme right til this day. 

It's also been shown that even the fairest skin, bluest eyes, and blondest hair haven't always provided protection against being branded black. Such was, by all accounts, the description of one Jane Morrison, 15, who via a complicated odyssey ended up being sold in January of 1857 to the slave trader James White in the slave market in New Orleans. Once sold into the slave trade, she was categorised as a negro or black. Her "white-like" features only made her a more valuable "black."  She ran away, and with the help of a benefactor, sued for her freedom in October of that same year in a Jefferson Parish courtroom. In a case that wouldn't be settled until after Lincoln's assassination, it would be heard by no less than three juries, and the Louisiana Supreme Court twice. The rich court records these proceedings left provide a unique window into the way race is defined in America.

While her blonde hair and blue eyes seemed to broadcast the conclusion that she was white, jurors were told not to believe their eyes. It was said that the mere fact that she had been sold into slavery was enough to prove her a negro. The defense said that while the required "drop of African blood" might not so easily visually detected, it could be proven by "scientific" racism with regards to her bone structure, by claims about her demeanor and sexuality, and lack of "feminine whiteness." In the end it would take a civil war for Morrison to claim her white identity. Race has never been about self-identification because race was developed as a method of social control.

In Conclusion

Trump's claim that:

"I didn't know she (Harris) was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black.",

turns the racist paradigm completely on its head. It's not the person of color that informs the white world what his or her racial identity is. It's quite the opposite. It's the white world, and white supremacists like Donald Trump, that inform the non-white people what subhuman category they have been lumped into, and almost nobody is talking about that. That's the beauty of Trump's gambit. 

Clay Claiborne

3 August 2024

I prefer to be identified as African American, but have used the label black for the purposes of this essay even though it has certain negative connotations embedded in it.