On January 31, 2007, Senator Joe Biden, then a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in the 2008 election, said this about fellow candidate Senator Barack Obama.
“I mean, you got the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," offered Biden. "I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
When called out on his comment, Biden explained, “This is a guy who’s come along in a way that’s captured the imagination of the country in a way that no one else has. That was the point of everything I was saying.”
Obama responded to Biden’s comments: “I didn’t take Sen. Biden’s comments personally, but obviously they were historically inaccurate. African-American presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one would call them inarticulate.”
Biden missed the point that what he may have intended as a compliment was actually his approval of how good a job Obama did in conforming to white society. He had been looked over and found acceptable while not given credit for the other factors that made him successful.
Author/poet Elyse Cizek wrote an essay in 2020 titled “When You Call Me “Articulate.” Here’s some of what she had to say:
“In my experience, white people very rarely refer to other white people as articulate. When you call me articulate, I hear that you only listen because I speak like you, and that you otherwise wouldn’t expect me to. When you call me articulate, you say it as if it is an honor and a surprise, that for someone who looks like me to be able to enunciate like you, to use the words you do, to moderate my cadence and remain calm and unbothered by your questioning of my validity, and to reply emotionlessly (save for my willingness to see you as a human being), I am somehow more deserving of being listened to.”
After her strong debate performance on September 10, when Harris demolished Donald Trump, the word used most often to describe her was “prepared.”
“A superbly prepared Kamala Harris may have turned doubters into believers,” said The Globe columnist Konrad Yakabuski
“She was exquisitely well-prepared, she laid traps, and he chased every rabbit down every hole,” added New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
“I think Donald Trump performed as well as expected — it was typical theatrical Trump — but Kamala Harris was perhaps a little better than expected," opined Sky News host Caleb Bond. "She managed to avoid descending into word salads. But that’s because the whole thing was essentially pre-prepared.”
“While Harris was able to get under Trump’s skin with her well-prepared attacks, it’s still not clear that she overwhelmingly convinced these voters to finally make up their minds from this exchange," surmised Ron Bonjean, Republican strategist "The question now is how much she actually moved the needle. However, Trump didn’t do himself any favors by agreeing to do this debate.”
Friends and foes alike have minimized Kamala Harris's excellence by reducing her to being prepared. This is no different than calling Barack Obama articulate. I don’t mean to diminish preparation. In Kamala Harris’s case, being prepared involved her undergraduate education at Howard University, law school at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. It entailed her years working at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office before accepting a junior position at the San Francisco DA’s Office and later the city attorney of San Francisco’s office.
In 2003, Kamala was elected DA of San Francisco. Harris was elected attorney general of California in 2010 and reelected in 2014. Harris was the first woman, African American and Asian American to hold these offices in the state’s history. Harris served as the junior U.S. senator from California from 2017 to 2021. She won the 2016 Senate election to become the second Black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. Her time on the Senate Judiciary Committee grilling the likes of Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett was clear preparation.
When Kamala wiped the floor with Trump on the debate stage before an estimated 65 million people, it wasn’t because she crammed hard for a few weeks in preparation. It was because her 34 years of public service had prepared her. A better word than prepared would be qualified. Harris beat Trump because she’s more intelligent, better educated, more empathetic, and has a clearer understanding of the issues. She was also willing to devote her time and energy to preparing for the debate, but her willingness and ability to prepare are a fraction of the whole, not the sum of who she is.
There is no doubt that Harris has prepared and will continue to do so as the 47th President of the United States. Limiting her praise to calling her prepared is a failure to recognize all her other gifts. She has been continually underestimated, and people are shocked to learn how qualified she is. The next time I hear someone describe Kamala Harris or any person of color as “prepared,” I’ll respond, “Don’t you men qualified?”
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of William Spivey's work on Medium. And if you dig his words, buy the man a coffee.
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