House GOP leaders are telling rank-and-filers to lay off the gender/race-based slurs against Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
Murray State University historian Brian Clardy doubts the double-barreled bigotry will stop. “This is just the beginning,” he said. “This is not dog whistling. It’s a howitzer shot, and you’re going to hear more of this.”
Clardy cited recent comments by Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) that Harris is “a DEI vice president” and a “DEI hire.” Burchett said President Joe Biden picked her as his running mate because she’s a Black woman. After Biden recently ended his campaign for a second term, the president endorsed Harris.
Republicans seldom miss a chance to vilify workplace programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI programs for short. The GOP thinks demonizing and demagoguing against DEI is a winning strategy with white folks, especially those in red MAGA ballcaps.
“The far right declares that the nation’s changing demographics threaten American culture and that diversity comes at the expense of White people,” wroteThe Washington Post’s Theodore R. Johnson. “Needing a scapegoat for these contentions, its champions have settled on DEI.”
The right-wing Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term, targets DEI for elimination. Trump denounces DEI and affirmative action as “anti-white” racism.
Clardy, a professor of history, said GOP candidates from Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, down the ballot, “are going to drag the vice president through the mud. They are going to play every single racist and sexist stereotype imaginable.”
Burchett had previously charged that Biden put Harris on his ticket because she’s a Black woman. “He’s just saying the quiet part out loud,” Clardy said.
The likes of Burchett are a far cry from the Republicans who founded the party in the 1850s on anti-slavery principles. That party of “Lincoln and Liberty” is long gone, according to Clardy.
“The Republican Party has become more extreme as the years have gone by. The way they react to women and people of color is abysmal, and you’re going to see them in this post-Jan. 6 era show their very worst faces. The hoods and white sheets are going to come off.”
Johnson also wrote that the far right trots out DEI as a handy scapegoat and “their catchall for everything that feels unfair or uncomfortable for White Americans. It’s also used as a pejorative for Black officials deemed unqualified or a quota choice: Kamala Harris is labeled a ‘DEI vice president.’ Both the governor of Maryland and the mayor of Baltimore are criticized as DEIs in office. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was accused of being an affirmative action appointment, seating DEI on the Supreme Court.”
According to Johnson, “Dr. DEI is an easy foil whenever provocateurs seek to stoke resentments. It’s why more than two-thirds of the nearly 200 state bills from 2021 to 2022 sought to restrict lessons on racial injustice and American history. The measures contained language — cribbed from right-wing think tanks and a Trump administration executive order — commanding that no student should feel guilt or anguish when learning about the uncomfortable parts of our national narrative.
“Dr. DEI is another political boogeyman for extremists, a treasonous character hellbent on undermining the country. It’s marketed as the work of America-hating academics in ivory towers, who seek to demoralize and indoctrinate young minds into thinking their nation is irredeemably racist. With each additional accusation of exploiting people’s sympathies while defrauding business and government for selfish gain, right-wing activists tacitly ask the same question: Who does this remind you of? Suggesting that maybe the welfare queen was not cast out … but that she went to graduate school.”
Johnson said whites are the sole racial and ethnic group that the GOP can count on at the polls. “Women, young adults, and college-educated and unmarried voters increasingly support left-leaning candidates, who advocate for government programs to address inequality and injustice. Former president Donald Trump told a South Carolina rally that this division is ‘not just a matter of values; it’s also a matter of national survival.’ Americans might not fully understand all the ways laws and policies interact with racial disparities, but they have opinions about DEI. That makes this complex issue easier to politicize – and easier to exploit for political and social advantage.”
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