Expanding the Vocabulary | Patricia J. Williams

“I am not running to be Black history professor,” said Kamala Harris in 2019. “I am running to be president.” Then as now, some were questioning whether she was “Black enough” or whether she was “too Black” or whether the American republic was ready for a woman president, much less a Black South Asian one. “I know who I am,” she announced with refreshing simplicity. “I think the frustration is that other people want me to take them through their process of discovery.”

Unburdened is the emotion I feel when thinking about Harris. “Joyful” too, yes, but from my perspective it is her refusal to be caught up in the sticky web of other people’s projections that makes her such a model of release and liberation. With warm but firm determination she brushes aside those who try to split her, like a mille-feuille, into layers and layers of stereotype. I am a little more than a decade older than Harris, and her fearlessness is a skill I have yet to master.

“You frightened me when you joined the office,” a very dear longtime male colleague told me recently. “The way you looked just scared me. But then I got to know you, and you taught me the valuable lesson of not judging a book by its cover.” I am relieved that his heart is now at ease—I genuinely mean that, for he is a valued friend and mentor. But there remains the difficult conversation we will one day have to have about what aspect of my “cover” was so fearsome that by his own account it took him years to find the delightfully soft center that is me. Really, I do wonder… Perhaps it was the color of my nail polish?

Even as I describe that kind of anxiety, I am exhausted by it. I was perpetually “the first” at almost every job I held in the early decades of my career—the first woman, the first Black person, the first person of any color. I was endlessly scrutinized for how I dressed, how I spoke, how well my accomplishments represented the plurality of “the race.” As a “first,” I know that my Blackness has sometimes been “accepted” or even “forgiven” (whatever that means) because I’m perceived as “presentable.” I felt entangled in the kind of faint praise with which Joe Biden once (if never again) described Barack Obama: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Afterward Obama issued a graciously conciliatory statement:

I didn’t take Senator 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.

Nevertheless, Biden’s comment was an excruciating reminder of how much of our lives we have spent begging for survival by studying the postures of “bright,” “clean,” “nice-looking.”

I know I’m not alone: most of us palatably “mainstream,” “articulate” so-called “firsts” are terribly aware that such approval is disproportionately premised on what it means to be “nice-looking.” Moreover, “nice-looking” for Black people in the Americas is also usually a code for colorism: lighter skin meant and still means a statistically easier life prospect. And lighter skin is a not-so-buried signifier of the rape of enslaved women and the historical positioning of their progeny as “house slaves”—that is, those potentially or at least partially spared the generally more life-draining labor of “field hands.” “House slaves” thus embodied a complicated social reality, often imitating the airs and sharing the deadly prejudices of their enslavers but also “stealing” and secretly sharing with other African Americans the forbidden assets of literacy, of mathematics, of history, engineering, and law. The contemporary trails of that history are knotty and embattled. Even today, to be perceived as “too saditty” or “high-toned” can carry heavy presumptions (justifiable or not) of being inherently condescending to other African Americans. By the same token, there is a constant low-level interrogation (again, justifiable or not) about who is “Black enough” to be considered “authentic.” It is this intraracial complexity that Donald Trump seemed to think he had standing to clumsily, ridiculously exploit this summer when he accused Kamala Harris of “suddenly” turning Black.

All in all Harris’s candidacy seems to be serving up a deep-dish helping of irony pie by evoking precisely the Black history so many Trump-loving Republicans like Ron DeSantis are seeking to suppress. In a fog of self-inflicted ignorance, the Fox News commentator Dinesh D’Souza once accused Harris of not being Black enough because she supposedly clings to an identity of “victimhood” by “falsely” claiming “slave ancestry” (not that Harris has ever asserted such a dead-end claim). It is D’Souza and D’Souza alone who maintains that she has no such purchase because her father might be descended from a wealthy white Jamaican slaveholder, whose son might have married a free Black woman (although even this much is very unclear from genealogical records). Whatever the particulars, D’Souza’s assertion is astonishingly ignorant—for he counts only that one white forefather in the absence of any knowledge of her Black foremother’s lineage.

One may well wonder how such a woman came to be free. In Jamaica, free status could have been acquired in one of several ways, none of which is removed from “slave ancestry.” Was she from a maroon colony of runaway slaves? Was she herself a runaway? Did a male relative purchase her freedom? She could have been born into slavery but given freedom because she was the child of a plantation owner. It would be good to know when she was freed and whether this happened by public act or private contract. Who were her parents and grandparents? Moreover, Jamaica, as a major producer of sugar and rum, was the site of some of slavery’s greatest brutalities, its most frequent slave rebellions, and outright wars. In all events, the idea that any of Harris’s ancestors—white, Black, mixed-race, or indigenous—were totally untouched by slavery’s punishing hierarchies is extremely unlikely.

Almost every African American is to some degree descended not only from slaves but also from white male enslavers, their sons, their neighbors, their overseers. Laws did not recognize the criminality of sexually exploiting Black women, who were classified as chattel and subhuman, and “breeding” slaves for eventual sale was an enormously important source of wealth—as well as of deep trauma for the women, whose consent was legally irrelevant. Generations later, the trauma of that culture of rape still operates as a kind of “postmemory” among Black families—not directly experienced but echoing as repercussive anxieties about sexual vulnerability and self-image.

It is a near history that still provokes twinges of alarm among some Black people who quietly worry whether Harris’s reception is related to those old “house slave” aesthetics, a sad kind of cultural favoritism based on the Europeanness of her features. And that sadness comes with a tremor of fear for their historical subjection to the white male gaze. This was peculiarly felt and demonstrated when, just recently, Trump alluded to the drawing of Harris on the cover of Time magazine and leeringly described her as looking

like the most beautiful actress ever to live. It was a drawing, and actually she looked very much like our great first lady, Melania. She didn’t look like Kamala, that’s right. But of course she’s a beautiful woman, so we’ll leave it at that.

That he licked his chops like this made many people’s blood run cold: his misogynist rapacity is neither flattering nor comfortable for anybody. But for those of us who still wear the skin history of such threatening disrespect, it held added intergenerational menace. As one friend put it: “Not the man I’d want to be owned by.”

Not to worry, I suppose: days after panting about Harris’s beauty, Trump was busy campaigning on the value of his being “much better looking” than she is.

Unfortunately, Trumpian political discourse often relies on such risibly competitive, self-centered anxiety: you can know people just by looking at them. Still, his shallow sobriquets confine their subjects in coffins of immovable destiny. This is an immature, anti-intellectual, but seemingly highly effective device by which the unknown chasm of another is filled with random, supposedly comic, yet poisonous insults: i.e., lowlifes and losers, little men and ugly women, dogs and degenerates, slobs and fat beasts.

Harris has demonstrated supreme patience and forbearance in dealing with this sort of thing. In a 2019 interview, she presciently anticipated the ignorance (if not the bad faith) of Trump’s recent attempt to pit her Indian identity against her Blackness, and gently deconstructed it:

Look. All of us who have become the first, part of the challenge is that people have their boxes…. They have this set of boxes, and they’re trying to figure out which one you fit into. But the number of boxes they have is limited to whatever they’ve seen before…. And we’re asking them to see something that they’ve not seen before.

Harris then interrogated the image that pops up when one hears the phrase “the boy next door”: “For most of America, what does that look like?” She ticked off the words on four fingers: “The. Boy. Next. Door. Four words speak volumes about the age, the look, the character of who we’re talking about.” In contrast, “what four words would immediately let you know about who I am?” Long pause. “It’s not in the vocabulary.”

Indeed it is not. I suspect this void is why there are so many headlines and captions pressing for Harris to “define herself” or for Trump to “redefine Harris.” It exceeds simple curiosity about her thoughts or policy details; there is a fervent demand for familiar boxes in which to confine her. (Although why four words like “Miserable. Childless. Cat. Lady.”—as J.D. Vance called Democratic leaders, including Harris—should have any chance of filling that gap is quite the mystery.)

It takes a while to decipher others when you’ve never met anyone “like” them. And despite 150 years of post–Civil War struggle, it is still true that many white people in the US grow up without ever befriending a Black person, without ever having any Black neighbors or even so much as a Black classmate. And while the nation has diversified in magnificent ways that should defy a simple conceptual split between Black and white, we are still very divided by flatly binary perceptions of race; new immigrants scramble to fit themselves between a this or a that, a same or an other, an “in” or an “out.” Trump, who is of Scottish and German ancestry, seems convinced that because Harris claims the simultaneous inheritance of Indian and Jamaican heritage she is an incomprehensible, hypocritical, flip-flopping liar. It is the incoherence of race as a signifier that allows the presumed “purity” of some heritages to glide through the universe with no need of explanation, while the ambiguity of others is perceived as anxiety-producing and contaminating. What are you? Where do you come from? No, I mean where do you really come from? For certain unboxed phenotypes, the answer is never allowed to rest with just “I’m from Indianapolis.”

Statistically, race and class remain the most determinative metrics of life outcome. And in a world of diminishing resources, the competition to claim a position at the top of the heap has become deadly. Fear of racial “replacement” has fueled a global resurgence of eugenic policies, and fear of losing a decent standard of living or being able to retain a home of one’s own has fueled dangerous territorial resentments. Against this backdrop, and with the amazing speed of only a few years, the MAGA movement has turned public rhetoric into a full-on assault. Women are defamed as “Miss Piggy” and “Horseface,” as fat-asses, grab-able pussies, wack jobs, birdbrains, and crazy-nasty-horrible lunatics. Black women are demeaned as vicious, incompetent, disrespectful, treacherous, unqualified, not worth taking seriously, and “not very smart.”

Kamala Harris alone has been skunk-sprayed by Republicans as a “bitch,” a “monster,” “pathetic,” “so fucking bad,” “totally unlikable,” “real garbage,” “trash,” “trashy,” “trash bag,” deadly and duplicitous, “low IQ,” simultaneously too weak and too strong, “propped up” by sinister forces yet single-handedly staging a “coup.” “Other countries will laugh at us” if she wins. When Biden was running, Republicans waved signs that read “Joe and the Hoe.” Since he dropped out, many still assure each other that she has ascended to power “on her back.”

The inexhaustible Dinesh D’Souza has even accused Harris of plagiarizing Martin Luther King Jr. when she wrote in her memoir that her mother first heard her calling for “fweedom” when she was in her stroller. (Her parents met while doing civil rights organizing at UC Berkeley.) But MLK was hardly alone in observing precocious children on the front lines: that is an experience every parent active in the civil rights movement has known. I learned to chant “Freedom!” as a small child in the 1950s while being carried on marches protesting segregation. Generations of civil rights babies learn the language of activism in the womb, in their BabyBjörns, and, yes, in their prams. My own son was in a stroller at a hotel workers’ strike when I heard him singing “Thawlidarity Foh-wevah!” Sheesh. Only professional propagandists could think of call-and-response as plagiarism.

This Republican litany of name-calling is the language of rank schoolyard bullies, television mobsters, and thin-skinned, bane-wreaking psychopaths. As a Canadian friend of mine has described the Trump years, “It’s like waking up in the middle of the night to the noise of your downstairs neighbor beating his wife to a pulp.” This sadism is not consistent with honest political debate. Its superficiality—a substitute for engaged encounter—evades all possibility of rational argumentation. And it is designed to make sure we remain not knowing what we don’t know. Don’t listen to them, don’t read what they write, whatever they say is wrong or stolen, look away. Nothing to see there.

But…trash talk does perform insidious associational labor: some of it sticks. The German Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer wrote in his wartime diary about the gradual devaluation of Jewish existence leading up to the final purges of the Third Reich. Books by Jewish writers were taken off the shelves. Jewish art, music, and history were suppressed. Anything written in Hebrew was erased from view. Any fragments of Hebrew lettering were removed from ancient façades. Klemperer eventually lost his job at the university as the increasingly powerful derogation of Who are you to teach us anything? became formalized as law.

It’s hard that the American scene has become such a phantasmic whirlpool of political instability—hard for everyone. Days before Biden withdrew, yielding the campaign to his vice-president, the Black woman whose name dominated the news cycle was Sonya Massey. The widely seen video of Massey being shot to death by a Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy (who had been discharged from the army in 2016 owing to serious misconduct) had pushed the question of police immunity to the forefront of public discussion. Thus, when Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, it was a moment of emotional overwhelm for many: as the civil rights attorney Ben Crump said, “It really is a tale of two historical moments in America. It’s like the best of times and the worst of times.”

It was certainly a painfully double-edged moment for me. As a woman, as a Black woman, and as a lawyer whose career began as a prosecutor and seems to be ending with my academic work recast by Donald Trump’s 2020 executive order as “Critical Race Theory poison,” I know that my own embodiment checks a lot of controversial boxes…and so I hold my breath. I, like so many, am delighted, surprised, buoyed by the present sense of elation, by the possibility of a symbolically expansive and transformational presidency. I hope against hope that the prospect of a Black South Asian female president might, just might, alter what some have called the “imagination barrier”—the reality that women who enter the political realm are too often hobbled by reductive norms of what our culture thinks legitimacy looks like. As Jennifer Palmieri, the former director of communications for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, has observed, there is an ineffable bias that shadows female candidates: she said the campaign called it “the TJSAH issue”—there’s just something about her.

Tense with apprehension, I recall the serial spectacles of hateful derogation that have haunted the most visible and bravely outspoken women in my lifetime: the attempted character assassination of E. Jean Carroll (and of her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan), of Christine Blasey Ford, of Anita Hill; the demonization of Janet Reno; the demeaning of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as someone who supposedly condoned child pornography; the mocking of Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas”; and the recent cartoonish dismissal of women without children. Women must put up with all kinds of external pressures to self-monitor and adhere to the metrics of performative respectability. When Justice Sonia Sotomayor was preparing for her confirmation hearing, she was reportedly advised to tone down anything that might feed into stereotypes about “hot” Latin women—including wearing colorful nail polish. Immediately after she was confirmed, I note happily, she appeared on the cover of Latina magazine, hands proudly displayed to foreground her fingernails, now neatly painted a bright red.

Like Clinton, Harris has been subjected to the kinds of scrutiny no man endures: there is endless media discussion of her pantsuits, of the symbolism of the colors she wears, of the height of her stiletto heels, of the timbre and tone of her voice. Clinton was memorialized by a “nutcracker” figurine when she ran for president, Harris with “Laffin’ Kamala” memes.

The Democratic Party has heretofore neglected or altogether ignored this realm of visual theater. In a culture where fewer and fewer people operate effectively in the world of words, and where fewer find written systems of knowledge even legible, it has become increasingly important to translate political issues into forms that speak meaningfully to generations of citizens raised on the visual lexicons of moving pictures. Trump certainly demonstrated that skill set during his first run for the presidency when he violated every prior convention of debate decorum by standing directly behind Clinton while she was answering questions. No one remembers what she was talking about. (She happened to be speaking eloquently about health care reforms.) No one heard a word—the ears shut down. The only thing collective memory retains is Trump’s looming, unsettling visual dominance.

Indeed, Trump often disrupts memory by derailing trains of thought—not just with his nonsensical word lava but also with his insinuating facial expressions, his offensive hand gestures, his menacing body language. He issues death threats. He promises vengeance against his enemies—and their families. He is what Aristotle defined as an “incontinent” man—one who will not or cannot contain his thoughts and passions. He has reconfigured American politics as the kind of down and dirty mud-wrestling match at which he excels, with fog, flames, and carnage licking round his heels. He is the ringmaster of great fear—thrilling fear, awe-inspiring fear, excitingly vengeful fear. His rallies whip his followers into cathartic, unbounded states of almost blissful, unifying fear.

It leaves me breathless that nearly 50 percent of my fellow citizens are seduced by his empty yet ruthless rhetoric. Regarding the curiously cathartic appeal of such politics, the philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment:

Stupidity is a scar…. The intellectual gradations within the human species, indeed, the blind spots within the same individual, mark the points where hope has come to a halt and in their ossification bear witness to what holds all living things in thrall.

Trump’s goofy but very studied performance art—and his timing of its intervention—is always injected, in any public event, as a surprise. No one has had the presence of mind to respond to that “lurky clown” performance; no one has been able to recoup and remember the actual subjects under discussion. On any public stage, Trump likes to kick sand or suddenly pull the rug out from under his interlocutors. He simply does not play well with others, or by ordinary rules. Hope comes to a halt.

Harris’s campaign seems to have shaken us awake not just to hope, not just to joy, but also to the pressing urgency of our throbbing but somehow benumbed reality. Biden’s policies, lost in drowsy understatement, have resulted in a robust economy, dramatically lowered crime rates, and improved access to health care. Statistics show that the quality of American life is better across the board now than it was under Trump. But polls also show that most Americans do not know this, and do not connect any improvement in their lives to the specific Democratic policies that gave rise to it. Both Biden and Harris excel at wielding complex data, writing nuanced legislation, understanding labor policy, and producing deliverable economic outcomes. But alongside Trump’s frighteningly fascistic animus, such facts have escaped notice as quietly as Hannibal Lecter fading out of the frame.

It is what Trump does so successfully, over and over: he sets up an alternative universe, posited as utopic, in which he is the supreme protector and perfect being. But this is the move of a vampire—and we should think hard about that. According to most traditions, vampires cannot enter a house unless invited. Trump has brazenly proffered an unvarnished Mephistophelian bargain to those Americans who do vote to usher him across the threshold: that they will live forever and never have to vote again.

My life has been shaped by the roller-coaster promise of the civil rights movement. I sometimes feel as though we are watching a continuous reenactment of Franz Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” in which a Seeker of justice appeals to the Gatekeeper for entry into the great room of law. Everyone should have access, the Seeker believes, but he argues for admission in vain. Just so, Trump answers every request as though he were the Gatekeeper and every Seeker were defined as less than, not quite good enough to be let into the sanctum of his golden world. This bit of stagecraft seduces those who argue with him into a constant cycle of having to prove themselves worthy: worthy of asking, worthy of entering, worthy of being legally recognized. Such a relation locks justice seekers into the logic of constant hoop jumping. The dedicated Seeker is transformed into a show pony as she tries endlessly to prove herself worthy in form and figure. But this redirected scrutiny “forgets” to interrogate the one who has set himself up as circus ringleader and master of discourse: we forget to ask why the rhetoric of basic qualification never seems to apply to him.

At a moment in electoral history when Trumpism has effectively rechoreographed political campaigning according to the rules of World Wrestling Entertainment, that command of collective emotional affect is a power that must be taken seriously.

The philosopher Lewis Gordon has observed that you’ve already lost when someone says, “You’re not as good as I am,” and you reply: “Yes I am, just see what I can do.” You’ve allowed a standard to be set that is structured upon your failure to measure up. As Gordon points out, it is impossible for a person to refute such a structure by themselves. Therefore, in a debate with someone like Trump, you can’t allow yourself to be set up as the one who has to prove the “otherwise” of one’s worth. It was precisely this rhetorical trickery that, during the June 27 debate, led an exhausted President Biden to be drawn into argument about whose golf stroke was better than whose; it made sense only in the discursive cage of relentless one-upmanship. With such narrowed focus, Biden was transformed into a sparrow perched on the lip of an alligator poised, but in no hurry, to snap.

Biden’s subsequent withdrawal from the race upended this confidently predatory bit of visual choreography. Biden’s figure as a too-docile easy mark was suddenly replaced by a secret superhero—Kamala Unburdened!—who yanked off her drab civilian mask to reveal a complicated identity that incorporates every category on the planet that bedevils Trump and drives him mad: Black, Asian, ethnic, female, the daughter of immigrants, and…a district attorney no less! Flicking her prosecutorial Lasso of Truth, Kamala Harris is simply not playing his game.

By the time of the Democratic National Convention in late August, Harris had emerged from the sidelines in a shimmering shower of sparks, with her own handcrafted labels aimed at the Trumpian transgressors she has put behind bars: “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

It seems to be working, and it’s surely about time. Perhaps it is just that Trump’s tropes have been used so often that they sound flat, flustered, tuckered out. And as a brilliant master of visual theater herself, Harris has managed to project vastly more vitality than Biden and vastly more sanity than Trump—particularly when he gets stuck vainly resurrecting the March on Washington as though to compete with the ghost of Martin Luther King Jr. for crowd size.

Through all this, Harris has been a perfect apotheosis: the picture of poise, equilibrium, and focus. She is lighthearted yet very serious. In the competitive image sweepstakes of political womanhood, she has proved “a breath of fresh air.” And despite an exceptionally foreshortened selection process, she displayed resounding political savvy in partnering herself with Tim Walz, a reassuringly solid Everyman whose grounded honesty, warm intelligence, and gentle “dad strength” will be hard to belittle. The picture of Walz cradling a snoozing piglet at the Minnesota State Fair alone is such a life-affirming riposte to the former Republican vice-presidential hopeful Kristi Noem’s assertion that killing her disobedient dog, Cricket, made her a “doer,” not an “avoider,” and that she was therefore somehow better equipped for “tough” political decision-making. Although Republicans and Democrats alike recoiled from that logic, the emotions aroused underscored profound ideological differences between the two sides. It seemed to be a point of inflection, illuminating the thundering meanness of Trump’s rallies and allies.

To me, the most captivating moment of the Democratic National Convention was when four of the now fully exonerated Central Park Five took the stage to speak about what they had suffered during that ordeal more than thirty years ago. Korey Wise, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, and Yusef Salaam (who was recently elected to the New York City Council) ranged from fourteen to sixteen years old when they were wrongfully convicted.

The reason I was so particularly moved by their appearance at the convention is that I attended the 1990 trial of those young men. I sat in that courtroom from beginning to end, and it was the saddest spectacle I have ever witnessed, dominated by fear-laced outlaw narratives that proved more powerful than reasoned evidence. It was an object lesson in how easily fact may be bulldozed and buried by passionate narratives of jumbled nonsense. The bottom line is that there was no physical evidence that linked any of the defendants to this very bloody crime. (The jogger lost 75 percent of her blood in the attack.) And despite detailed accounts of that lack of evidence in a film by Ken Burns (The Central Park Five, 2012) and a television show by Ava DuVernay (When They See Us, 2019), many people were so swept away by the emotionalism of that time that they remain convinced, even to this day, that those young men must have done something.

Joan Didion’s 1991 essay in these pages, “New York: Sentimental Journeys,” deserves careful rereading. It remains among the most comprehensive documents of the consuming hysteria that gripped the city at that time. Op-eds went on endlessly about unhinged Black “thugs” marauding like wolves and rapacious “super-predators.” The headlines read like some unholy cross between Birth of a Nation and Frankenstein. But the most powerful of those hysterical scripts was the now-notorious full-page advertisement that Donald Trump hastened to run in all four of the city’s major newspapers—published even before the teens had been arraigned or indicted. They were rounded up amid the whirlwinds of a moral panic whipped up in no small part by Trump, the man who, as the Republican presidential candidate, is now doing the same thing to the nation—on steroids. Even at that time he had his favorite themes and memes: things were better back “Then,” in some romantically gilded anterior era; “Now” has been overtaken by apocalypse and carnage, and “roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods,” intent upon “the complete breakdown of life as we knew it.” With his signature taste for sadism, he wrote: “I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”

Indeed, it was Trump’s persistent advocacy that helped kindle the subsequent years of increasing mass incarceration. By 1995 he had also helped reinstate New York’s death penalty. In 2004 that reinstatement was ruled to violate the New York State Constitution, but only after one Matias Reyes had come forward in 2002 and confessed that he, acting alone, had assaulted the Central Park victim. Subsequent examination of the DNA evidence—some of which the police had possessed at the time of the trial but had failed to cross-reference—confirmed that Reyes was the only perpetrator in that case. He had also raped at least five other women and committed one murder.

I could digress with a thousand other observations about the complete dearth of forensic proof in this case—details that were obvious during the trial, that remain on the record, yet were discounted by the public, by the howling media, by police, by the judge, by the shockingly inexperienced and incompetent defense counselors, and most significantly by the prosecutorial team, whose ethical duty was precisely to protect against such miscarriages. All these years later it is the egregious behavior of the prosecution team that still gives me palpitations. They are the ones who aggressively staged the trial as a dog and pony show, who tried all the defendants together as though they were a single clotted mass of evil.

No decent prosecutorial process should have allowed that case to unfold into the travesty it became. I was impressed that the Harris campaign appreciated and had the courage to foreground that still-embattled history. Indeed, it is Harris’s consistently ethical track record as a senator and as a prosecutor upon which I base my deepest support for her. She has described the often difficult but necessary function prosecutors perform as officers of the court, and she has made clear her belief that a major qualification for public servants must be the ability to see beyond preconceived boxes. She speaks of dealing with victims, families of victims, and perpetrators themselves; grieving mothers who lost children, whose deaths were not taken seriously, children of children whose trauma reproduces itself in yet more trauma inflicted; people who have served their time behind bars but are released back into the world with little more than a bus ticket and no job skills.

She has dedicated herself to reenvisioning homicides as more than mere statistics, more than deaths foretold, more than the humdrum inevitable outgrowth of stereotyped urban landscapes. Most importantly, in deciding when and how to bring charges in a case, she cautions that if you can’t see that random teenager walking down the street as a possible honor student, or “Tamir Rice [as a child] or Atatiana [Jefferson] as an auntie in her own home, it can have lethal consequences.” We are all ethically required to “figure out the diaspora,” she said in an interview—years ago, as though speaking to Donald Trump in the present tense. “Your limited view of who people are—don’t put that on [them] because you don’t have the ability to see the variety and the diversity and the depth.”

This comprehensiveness of vision, this capacious balance of law and order and sanity and proportion, this disciplined command of human possibility, is what I hope we restore to our political landscape with her election. There is still a long way—if a very short time—to go.