During the Democrat presidential debates last week, candidate Kamala Harris told us that, “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools. She was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.”
In his Tuesday column, Jay Fleitman interpreted this as Harris presenting an “impassioned story of her oppression as an impoverished minority child forced into school busing.”
Then, to discredit her supposed self-presentation as coming from a struggling background, he gives us “the truth of her background” by informing us that her parents were a scientist and an economics professor.
The problem is, as debate transcripts make clear, she never stated or implied anything about her family’s economic or professional status in her statements, nor whether being bused felt “forced” or was by choice.
That Fleitman so easily fell into a socially and politically erroneous stereotype correlating people of color with impoverishment and low academic achievement is more than just troubling. It is dangerous.
Regardless of one’s personal or political views, people with influence must be particularly cognizant of how their misrepresentations can lead to demonization and perpetuation of hate and blame of those demonized.
Ellen Pader
Florence