Kamala Harris is the first Indian-American senator, the first woman vice president, and now co-holder of TIME magazine’s steadily-less-prestigious-but-still-treated-as-newsworthy Person of the Year award. TIME honored Harris for being ‘an embodiment of America’s diversity,’ a polite way of saying that the Biden campaign couldn’t find a part-black, part-Asian woman who was also part-Hispanic to nominate ahead of her.
But as Harris heads off the Naval Observatory to wait for Old Joe to step aside, her California Senate seat is being left vacant. And so, the great scrum is on to decide who will fill it. And in a true ‘embodiment of America’s diversity,’ nobody is talking about who is best qualified for the seat. Instead, they are talking about the best skin color to fill it (here’s a hint: not white).
This week, a group of 28 civil rights leaders wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom, warning him that appointing anybody other than a black woman to fill Harris’s seat would be a ‘step backward’ for the Pyrite State. That seems reasonable. Kamala Harris may be a woman with ideas, and values, and priorities, but really the only way to honor her is to grant a life peerage to a person who checks the same census box. The letter-signers recommended Barbara Lee or Karen Bass, both part of California’s House delegation. Are Lee or Bass particularly close to Harris politically?
But wait! Another group has entered the race race. Hispanics say that Harris’s Senate seat should be their tribute, as their prize for being exceptionally numerous. Most of them want California secretary of state Alex Padilla to get the nod instead.
‘The highest chamber in Congress must represent the communities it serves, and California is long overdue to have a Latino voice in the halls of the United States Senate,’ said the CEO of the Latino Victory Fund last month.
‘California is blue, blue, blue because of us,’ California Assembly woman Lorena Gonzalez said last month. ‘It is our housekeepers and our janitors. We built California as a new California, as a California that elects Democrats time and time again.’
All this racial grievance-mongering is threatening the vibe of the Democratic kumbaya coalition. At the Los Angeles Times, columnist Erika D. Smith sees a way to break the impasse: just give both races a seat, by purging the icky white person.
Sitting senator Dianne Feinstein is 87 and in the past week, several stories have been published about her allegedly fading mental condition. Such articles can now be published without reminding people that Joe Biden may still think it’s 1987.
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If Feinstein resigns, both a black and Hispanic could be appointed, Smith says. Harmony will be restored. California may have voted against affirmative action last month, but Newsom has a chance to atone for the electorate’s sin.
‘The more I listen to Black and Latino leaders demand it [representation] on behalf of a state that is becoming more diverse every year, the less I understand why our senior senator is still in office, blocking progress,’ Smith writes.
If only it were so easy. California’s race fight isn’t a boxing match. It’s a free-for-all wrestling bout, with a third contender in the ring. In the past, California’s Asians might have sat in dignified silence as others squabbled for the spoils of office. But in 2020 California, and the 2020 Democratic party, instead of all politics being local, all politics are racial. And so, the increasingly organized Asian community has piped up to remind everyone that they outnumber California blacks two to one, and that Harris was half-Asian as well as half-black. Really, they deserve the seat most of all. The president of the CalAsian Chamber of Commerce suggested seven different names, who share nothing other than ancestors from Earth’s largest continent (because really, is anything more important?).
No wonder so many Democrats want to reform the Senate. If they can’t find enough multiracial candidates to keep every part of their coalition happy, the party might collapse.
