Is America ready to elect a Black woman president?

It’s the big question that has loomed over Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign from the start: is the United States ready for a Black woman president?

I get asked this almost every time I speak about American politics. And it’s a question that pundits, observers and experts keep asking, without ever landing on an answer.

That’s because the question is, in the end, unanswerable. It’s so heavily loaded that answering it requires too much history, cultural knowledge, judgment and speculation.

While the question hints at the deeply ingrained racism and sexism that is built into the structures of American politics and culture, it doesn’t directly address these things, leaving assumptions about just how sexist and racist the country might be unresolved.

Asking if America is “ready” also assumes that history is progress – that things move forward in a relatively straight line. It assumes that in the past America was not ready for a Black woman president, but at some point in the future it might be. It assumes, as Martin Luther King junior once said so beautifully, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”.

Like much of King’s teachings, this idea has been flattened into an assumption that “progress” is inevitable – that women and people of colour will eventually get equal representation and treatment as society learns, gradually, to become more just, tolerant and accepting.

It assumes that, one day, the United States will live up to its own foundational ideal that “all men are created equal”.

But as Harris has herself said, the United States has not always lived up to its own ideals. Progress on equality – especially in extending it beyond the original, exclusively white men identified in the Constitution – has been patchy and frustratingly slow. It has also been marred by violence and even war.

History is not a forward march. It does not “progress” to some end point of idealism. It is, more often than not, a fight.

Are you ready for it?

Many other countries have shown it is possible to be “ready” for a woman leader at various points in their histories, only to return to being not ready again.

India, the largest democracy in the world, elected Indira Gandhi to the prime ministership in 1966. Gandhi served for over a decade, and then again from 1980 to 1984, when she was assassinated. Every leader since then has been a man.

Similarly, the United Kingdom elected its first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in 1979. After Thatcher resigned in 1990, the UK didn’t have another woman leader until Liz Truss in 2022 (and that didn’t exactly go well).

In Australia, Julia Gillard won a very close election to become prime minister in 2010, only to lose to a man four years later. There has been no real suggestion that a woman, let alone a woman of colour, might ascend to the leadership of either major party in the decade since. And could Australia even be definitively considered “ready” for a woman leader in that period, given how Gillard was treated during her prime ministership?

Julia Gillard’s famous misogyny speech in 2012.

New Zealand has a stronger record. Jenny Shipley became the first woman prime minister in 1997 by bumping off the leader of the coalition government. Helen Clark was then the first woman to be elected prime minister in 1999, followed by Jacinda Ardern nearly two decades later, in 2017.

Vigdis Finnbogadottir in 1985. Wikimedia Commons

While Britain, New Zealand and Australia have some political and cultural similarities with the United States, they have different political structures. Unlike in the US, their leaders are not directly elected, making the specific identity of the leader less explicitly the focus of elections.

Other countries with direct elections, though, have also been “ready” for women leaders at one point or another. In 1980, Iceland became the first country in the world to directly elect a woman to the presidency. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir served for 16 years. Deeply conservative Ireland was also ready 30 years ago, directly electing its first woman president, Mary Robinson, in 1990.

Structural inequality

For the most part, though, these women are exceptions to ingrained, structural gender inequality in politics across the world – albeit a reality reflected more starkly in the American experience.

The fact the question of “readiness” remains so prominent reflects the fundamental reality of the unequal representation of women, especially Black women and women of colour, not just in America but in most democracies.

In June this year, UN Women noted only 27 countries currently have women leaders. It said:

At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.

The idea of a “rate” of progress once again assumes the world will be ready for women leaders one day (even if that day might be more than a century away).

Unsurprisingly, the same structural inequality is reflected below the highest levels of leadership. UN Women found only 15 countries where women hold at least 50% of Cabinet minister positions. And when women do get leadership positions, it’s often in areas traditionally understood as “women’s” or “minority” issues, such as social services or Indigenous affairs.

This general trend is reflected in the US, too. After the most recent US election, the Congress has a “record number” of women. Yet it is still just 28%.

Similarly, in Australia, research by The Australia Institute found women are underrepresented in seven of Australia’s nine parliaments.

That should not, however, undermine the significant achievements of women and people of colour, who have long fought for a seat at the table of power – often at great personal risk.

According to the Pew Research Center, the current Congress in the US is also the most racially and ethnically diverse in history, with 133 representatives and senators identifying their ethnicity as something other than non-Hispanic white.

And in 2021, Harris became the first woman, the first person of South Asian descent and the first Black woman to be vice president of the United States. In another historic milestone, President Joe Biden appointed the first Native American woman to a Cabinet position – Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.

A milestone was achieved in Australia, too, when Linda Burney became the first Aboriginal woman to serve as minister for Indigenous affairs in 2022.

Weaponising gender and race

None of this, though, can confirm or deny the “readiness” of the United States – or any other country – to elect a Black woman leader.

There are signs a sizeable portion of the American electorate is decidedly not ready to elevate a woman, let alone a Black woman, to the highest position of power.

A great deal of attention has, rightly, been focused on the current Republican candidates’ attitudes towards gender and race. Vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, for instance, has made numerous comments about women, such as his insistence that “childless cat ladies” have too much power. Donald Trump has also repeatedly attacked women with sexist remarks, made obscene comments about women’s bodies, and been found liable in a civil court for sexual assault.

In August, Fox News anchor Jesse Watters suggested generals would “have their way” with Harris if she were to be elected.

Trump, Vance and their surrogates use race and gender to delegitimise their opponents, suggesting they are not fit for positions of power.

Such misogynistic attacks are a common experience for women in politics. Decades before Vance’s insistence that only people with biological children have a proper “stake” in the future, an Australian Liberal senator suggested Gillard was unfit for leadership because she was “deliberately barren”.

As a Black woman, Harris faces attacks on both her race and her gender. Right-wing figures have repeatedly dismissed her as a “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) candidate, suggesting she has only made it as far as she has because of special treatment based not on her merit, but on her identity.

Once again adopting a tactic he honed during Barack Obama’s presidency, Trump has also repeatedly questioned Harris’ legitimacy as vice president and a candidate based on her race.

America may soon be subjected to the country’s first DEI president: Kamala Harris https://t.co/NKW0RuBuBr pic.twitter.com/hF86fo4NCw

— New York Post (@nypost) July 6, 2024

Context matters

Not so long ago, many people assumed Hillary Clinton would win the race to be “first”. When she accepted the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, she stood, symbolically, underneath a shattering glass ceiling.

A few months later, that ceiling quickly re-formed itself.

But even Clinton’s loss in 2016 cannot definitely prove that America was “not ready” for a woman president. Context is crucial.

Even those voters who might be “ready” for a woman president won’t vote for just any woman. They will make decisions based on complicated, interrelated factors, including a candidate’s policy positions.

It’s arguable the role both Bill and Hillary Clinton played in the adoption of free-trade agreements – from Bill Clinton’s overseeing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to Hillary Clinton’s support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – alongside economic stagnation in the US, had a much bigger role in Clinton’s loss than her gender. And her characterisation of alienated voters as “a basket of deplorables” certainly didn’t help.

Clinton had significant political baggage after decades in the spotlight. The political, economic and historic circumstances of the 2016 presidential race – alongside Trump’s political ascendancy – are impossible to pull apart.

Similarly, while some Britons might have voted for Thatcher because she was a woman, many also voted for her because of her conservative policy positions, or perhaps because they disapproved of her opponents more.

Decades later and worlds apart politically, Harris is under pressure from a critical section of her own party’s base to modify her position on Israel. This is a serious and pressing policy issue that has nothing to do with her race or gender and everything to do with competing visions for the United States’ role in the world. And this will have an impact on many voters’ decisions in November.

Put simply, it cannot be definitively argued that Clinton lost in 2016 because America was “not ready” for a woman. Or that circumstances have changed enough that the country can be considered ready now.

In a different context, with a different candidate and a different policy platform, America may well have been “ready” in 2016. A different woman – like, say, the unwaveringly popular Michelle Obama – might well have been able to beat Trump. Or not. We simply have no way of knowing.

And even if we did, we still could not know if America was definitively “ready” for a Black woman to lead.

Kamala Harris’ ‘firsts’

Nevertheless, at this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Hillary Clinton reflected on the possibility of “firsts” and the progress of American history. She proclaimed that “a future where there are no ceilings on our dreams” had finally arrived.

Harris, too, is focused on the future – but not on her “firsts”.

In her first media interview since becoming the Democratic candidate, for example, she dismissed a question about Trump’s focus on her race. Her campaign has successfully framed any specific focus on gender or race – and particularly on women’s bodies – as “weird”.

Q: "[Trump] suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity?"

Harris: "Same old, tired playbook. Next question." pic.twitter.com/zfHUSFgGiy

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) August 30, 2024

In this way, Harris’ campaign has firmly flipped the focus of identity politics back onto Trump and Vance. Her campaign is showcasing a very different kind of masculinity – one that is entirely comfortable with Black women occupying positions of leadership.

The Harris campaign is reinforcing this framing by focusing not on individual “firsts”, but on structural gender and racial inequality and women’s basic rights of bodily autonomy. In this way, the campaign is embracing a collective feminism, rather than the more 1990s-style, individualistic, “white women” feminism more redolent of Clinton. Kamala is, after all, brat.

The Harris campaign is explicitly avoiding the tempting shallowness of identity politics, learning the lessons of an often fraught Clinton campaign that appeared to assume Americans would vote for her precisely because she was a woman, or because it was time America did, finally, elect a woman president.

All of this is, implicitly at least, a recognition that “readiness” is not a simple question with a straightforward answer. The Harris campaign recognises it is not necessarily a question of collective “readiness”, but of getting enough Americans who are already ready inspired and mobilised.

As Biden has said repeatedly, “women are not without […] electoral or political power”. According to one analysis, in the four years since 2020, Black women’s voter registration has increased by 98.4%. Among young Black women, it has increased by 175.8%.

Black American women are clearly ready for this moment.

There's a surge in voter registration among key demographics ahead of November's election. According to the data firm TargetSmart, registration is up more than 175% among young Black women.

"175% is almost tripling of registration rates among this specific group. You just don't… pic.twitter.com/34NcsylGnH

— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 27, 2024

The question has no answer

If Harris is elected this November, many will take this as proof that a threshold has been crossed, that America was indeed collectively “ready” to be led by a Black woman. And that might be true. Up to a point.

The United States once demonstrated itself “ready” to elect its first Catholic president. In 2008, it proved itself “ready” to elect the first Black president.
But eight years later, in an historic, world-shaping backlash, it went back to being very much not ready.

The divides of American politics are deep and structural. They have remained unresolved since the country’s foundation. The election of the first Black woman would be hugely significant, a remarkable historical development in what has already been an extraordinary campaign.

But the question of whether America is “ready” for this moment cannot be answered by a single individual.

There are two versions of America: one that is ready for this moment (and has always been), and one that will likely never be. These two versions co‑exist. And they are, for the moment, irreconcilable.

Both sides know that victory in November is only an indication of where power lies in this moment. It will not be some clear resolution to a centuries-long question about what the United States is and what it wants to be.

That’s not how history works.