On Oct. 10, the Heller School for Social Policy and Management hosted a panel discussion, titled “Four Takes on the U.S. presidential Election: Gender, Diaspora, Class, Race.” In discussion were Prof. Faith Smith (AAAS/ENG), Prof. Anita Hill (SP/WGS), Prof. ChaeRan Freeze (NEJS) and Prof. Harleen Singh (GRALL/WGS). Each panelist had the opportunity to share their perspectives of the upcoming presidential election. The panel was moderated by Maria Madison, the Interim Dean of The Heller School for Social Policy and Management. 

Smith, the Marta F. Kaufman Chair in African American Studies and a professor of English, delved into the dynamics of immigration and community identity, particularly focusing on how societal narratives can create or break down notions of belonging. She used Trump’s repeated false claim that Hatians in Springfield, Ohio are eating pets, as seen during the Sept. 10 Presidential debate, as an example of how racist sentiments about Hatians are not isolated remarks but part of a broader, historical pattern of discrimination against Haitians in the U.S. 

Several examples of this kind of discrimination against Hatians can be seen in the barring of Haitians from donating blood in the 1980s after the Centers for Disease Control claimed that Haitian immigrants were considered highest risk of contracting Human immunodeficiency virus; denying Haitians the right to remain in the U.S. and detaining them at the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, despite having been granted asylum in the 1990s and during the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti when some U.S. religious leaders blamed the disaster on Hatians for “their spiritual anatomy and as punishment for their courage, faith and military prowess and determination that gave birth to the Haitian revolution,” Smith said. “What does that make us, neighbors who welcome and who benefit from the city’s economic turnaround, but then who turn to rhetoric about how ‘those people’ with unnatural appetites are destroying ‘our’ way of life?” Smith asked, questioning how such harmful views can persist in society. “How do we transform ourselves into people who can be swayed by this rhetoric and who participate in turning our neighbors into political photos, rendering them vulnerable to symbolic and material attack. This is about claiming space and deciding that others are taking up space inappropriately.”

Although her examples focus on the Haitian community, Smith highlighted the concept of “Haitian adjacent,” which encompasses broader contexts where “Haitian” represents more than just the community itself and includes other groups and international dimensions. 

However, Smith cautioned attendees:

“This is not just politicians. This demonization can also come from groups that are particularly adjacent,” she says, giving examples where longer-term immigrants, U.S. citizens or not, may adopt exclusionary attitudes towards newer arrivals, framing them as undeserving. 

We can perpetuate the demonization and hold stories that connect us and shape us as political actors, even as we grapple with feelings of exclusion, explains Smith. She invited attendees to critically examine “what turns ‘me’ into the ‘we’ and ‘us’ against which they are pitted,” and continue to question both the conditions under which we feel safe and prosperous and at whose expense they arise.

Singh highlighted a significant paradox in the U.S. cc “oldest democracy,” which has yet to elect anyone but a cisgender male to its highest office, while many other countries have successfully done so. This observation raises the critical question: Does the presence of women in leadership roles necessarily equate to transformative politics? She argues that the focus on electing candidates based on identity categories, such as gender or race, often overshadows the need for genuine transformative policies. Singh cites the example of Indira Gandhi, who, despite being a woman in power, suspended democratic rights during the 1975 Emergency in India. This example illustrated for Singh that having women in leadership does not automatically lead to progressive change.

“To me, growing up in India, I never doubted that women can be leaders,” Singh said, “however women’s leadership to me in many ways was not any different than that of other leaders.”

She went on to share that she’d like to “implode this gendered progressive narrative that we have come to employ, as if simply putting someone in place is to redo everything we’ve had before.” Instead, Singh suggests that electing a leader should not solely be about ticking off all the boxes of social identities, but rather voters should pay more attention to “transformative politics in the world we live in.”

One issue that arises from the hyper-focus on a candidate’s identity, Singh highlights, is the division it creates among different communities. She notes that while the South Asian community has rallied around Harris and embraced her as their candidate, this support can serve as a way to divert attention from the deep-rooted anti-Blackness that is present within immigrant communities. Singh poses questions of whether they would accept a Black person or an African American as a son-in-law, daughter-in-law, or simply as a family member, answering, “probably not.” She points to the model-minority myth — a stereotype that portrays certain racial or ethnic groups, particularly Asian Americans, as inherently successful and socially compliant, explaining that “they are happy to accept one as a candidate for their political choices because this is someone who seems to have gone beyond the racial and the cultural categories of either being South Asian or Black.” 

Additionally Singh adds that women leaders are often held to unrealistic standards, primarily due to the century-long influence of a patriarchal leadership model. The current expectations of leadership are shaped by gender and race, and if Harris becomes the first women of color to be president, there will be a huge expectation of her to be the radical change. “Perhaps true equality will be achieved when women are allowed to fail just as much as men,” Singh said. 

Continuing, Singh reminds us that “Our leader[s] will fail us. Our heroes fail us … The people we most look up to are human.” Singh asked attendees to “think about the profound sense of duty that we are actually endowed with in exercising our vote” and to reflect on not just the “perfect candidate” but about their character, qualities and values that would “restore our faith in the democratic process, in each other and in community.” 

Freeze explored the concept of intimacy and how it goes beyond the private sphere and its relation to national politics. Drawing on cultural theorist Lauren Berlant’s definitions of intimacy, Freeze noted that the Harris campaign carefully crafted Harris’s narrative and image. 

Intimate moments like glimpsing a picture of Harris’ Indian mother, hearing stories of Harris growing up in a middle-class household or Harris responding “Just don’t call me aunty” when asked by Mindy Kaling how she should refer to Harris in a cooking video all aim to get voters excited from seeing reflections of themselves in her story. Intimacy, Freeze points out, encompasses not just closeness, but also a shared understanding and the creation of a narrative that connects individuals on a deeper level.

However, Freeze warns of the potential negative impact of intimacy in the Harris campaign, elaborating that although intimacy can create a sense of familiarity, it can also soften Harris’ image for people who are uncomfortable with the idea of a woman becoming the president. 

“The public’s need to see Harris in these intimate domestic spaces reveal deeply entrenched gender and racial expectations,” Freeze said. Specifically, she recalls earlier in May, when Drew Barrymore said on her show that Harris needs to be “Mamala of the country.”

While “Mamala” is an intimate nickname that Harris’s step-kids call her, Berrymore’s usage of the nickname in a broader context “perpetuates the stereotype of Black women as caregivers and domestics, evoking the stereotype of the mammy,” Freeze says.

Building on Singh’s insights, Freeze underlined that for marginalized communities, the cultivated intimacy has inspired hope that Harris’ priorities will resonate with their own experiences. “Hope,” Freeze says, is a “weak” word that “fails to capture our high expectations, our impossible demands.” She elaborates that it is not enough to simply see marginalized groups reflected in the high powerful positions. Traits of Blackness and womanness do not guarantee trustworthiness if we allow ourselves to be placed in roles that uphold the oppressive status quo, she argues. Even though Harris has and can continue to shatter the highest glass ceiling, she still would have the “unspoken fantasies, implicit rules and hidden obligations” of being the face of American hegemony, capitalism and U.S. militarism that is expected of the highest office in the land. 

Freeze did leave attendees of the panel with a sense of optimism, referencing Berlant’s idea that “intimacy is world-building.” While Freeze acknowledges Harris’ lack of perfection and the overall need for constructive feedback, she also asserted that electing Harris would “creates spaces, usurps places meant for other kinds of relationships [and] has the potential to destabilize” the current political environment. 

Hill, the final panelist, began by discussing Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing in March 2022, which was marked by sexist and racist questioning. Despite Jackson’s accomplished record as a lawyer and judge, she was labeled by republican challengers as President Joe Biden’s “DEI candidate.” But critics of Jackson were unsuccessful at preventing her confirmation, and the Senate confirmed her on April 7, 2022 with a 53 to 47 vote. In that moment, Hill had hoped that the demoralizing tactics employed by Jackson’s detractors might finally start to wane. 

“I thought we might be at a turning point,” Hill said while reflecting on the historic confirmation, and expressed her hopes that the U.S. would begin “moving away from the pervasive practice of applying sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia against individuals.”

However, that has certainly not been the case, as Harris continues to be questioned and attacked based on her gender and racial identities. This pattern of sexism and racism reflects a deeper historical context rooted in a structural system like the Supreme Court, that has allowed for demoralizing rhetoric to thrive, as seen in cases like Johnson v. McIntosh, a case that established the precedent that Native Americans cannot directly sell land to private citizens without the consent of the federal government. Hill says the ruling ultimately resulted in the land theft and displacement of Native Americans and the establishment of Indian boarding schools, and that these kinds of cases involved racial and ethnic construction that was then used to justify the denial of constitutional rights to various marginalized groups. “It is a prime example of loathsome rhetoric that has been used to characterize indigenous people,” Hill said. “It is true evidence of the lawlessness of law and the lawlessness of the rhetoric that has been used to embody law.”

The dehumanization rhetoric continues beyond historical text, Hill says, and is reflected in Project 2025 — conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration — and how Harris is talked about. 

Using Sarah Goldberg’s, MA ’24, categorization of gender bias, Hill explained how much of the rhetoric falls under perception bias, competence bias and electability bias. In Harris’ case, perception bias tends to focus on the tendency to define what it means to be a woman leader primarily through physical and intellectual traits associated with motherhood. Competence bias refers to the tendency to associate women’s competence primarily with soft skills like domestic, societal concerns rather than hard skills like economic or national security matters. It is also the “presumption of incompetence attached to most women who run for high office,” Hill adds. The final bias, electability bias, highlights the importance of likability or attractiveness in how Harris presents herself. Hill noted that there is a bias for the images pointed out by Freeze, which Hill argues portrays Harris as a “joyful warrior” instead of the stereotyped image of “angry Black women.” 

Hill wrapped up her remarks by emphasizing that we should all take this personally as this type of rhetoric speaks about “us as a country.” What’s at stake here is personal, she argued, and each of us could face similar threats, dangers and aggression that Kamala Harris is experiencing. 

With only two weeks until the Nov. 5 presidential election, Harris’ historic nomination and broader social issues of race, gender, immigration and class, which have shaped the careers of both Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, will undoubtedly influence voters’ decisions.