DEI Candidates
Is all diversity created equal?
A longtime commenter asserted yesterday that Kamala Harris was a “DEI” candidate because she was chosen for her race and sex, generating considerable pushback.
I’m actually sympathetic to the idea that Joe Biden boxed himself in with an early pledge to choose a woman as his running mate and was then pressured into narrowing that to “a woman of color” in the wake of the George Floyd protests, limiting his options considerably. While it’s certainly much larger than it would be in the Republican Party, the pool of women of color who are plausibly prepared to be President is relatively small. Given those constraints, I thought Harris clearly the best option (and said so before he picked her) but likely not the person who would have been most helpful to Biden in crucial swing states.
But, as Matt Bernius noted,
The idea of a single “best possible candidate” is already fiction. Further, in a multiethnic party that relies significantly on women’s votes, focusing on a specific race and gender mix can rationally be seen as part of what makes a good candidate.
As Gustopher mentioned, Harris will most likely be selecting a white man as a running partner (my bet is Governor Roy Cooper). And there are good racial and gender reasons for narrowing the list to just white men. Will that make them a DEI pick then?
Also, I’m curious, out of all of the potential VP nominees Trump could have selected, do you think Mike Pence was the best option? Or was he just the conservative equivalent of DEI? Likewise with Trump, why did he opt for such an incredibly young VP in Vance versus far more experienced policy makers like Tim Scott, Marco Rubio, or Gov. Doug Burgum?
NYT opinion columnist Lydia Polgreen expands on that thought in “If Kamala Harris Is a D.E.I. Candidate, So Is JD Vance.”
All politics is, at some level, identity politics — the business of turning identity into power, be it the identity of a candidate or demographic group or political party or region of the country. For modern presidential and vice-presidential candidates, one of their most valuable assets is their life story. Some elements of that story are bequeathed at birth, but what makes politicians successful is their talent at narrating that story in a manner that allows voters to see some version of themselves and their own aspirations in the candidate. This kind of storytelling, embedded in American archetypes and ideals, has shaped our politics.
Vance’s entire business and political career has flowed from his life story, which is embedded in identities he did not choose: Born a “hillbilly,” of Scottish-Irish descent, he grew up in poverty, son of a single mother who was addicted to drugs. Overcoming this adversity, these disadvantages, lies at the core of his personal narrative. His ascent would hardly be so remarkable if he started from a life of middle-class comfort. But no one is portraying Vance’s elevation to the Republican ticket as the outcome of some kind of illegitimate identity politics, nor is Vance perceived as having benefited from a political form of affirmative action.
And yet he almost certainly did. Race is not the only kind of diversity that gets noticed and embraced. Elite institutions love up-by-your-bootstraps Americans, and that archetype is all over Vance’s life story. A promising white candidate from a county that sends few students to an elite college like Yale would get a strong look, even if that person’s grades and test scores were less impressive than other applicants’. (To be clear, I have no idea what kind of grades or scores Vance had.) Regardless of race, applicants from working-class backgrounds, especially if they were the first in their family to attend college, are deemed to add class diversity.
[…]
In truth, it is pretty common for white men to get a leg up for some special part of their identity. Yet these men do not get labeled D.E.I. beneficiaries. People don’t worry that their surgeon or pilot or president was a D.E.I. hire, even though he might have gotten his spot at an elite college because he was the son of a wealthy alumnus or because he happened to come from a state that is historically underrepresented in elite higher education. Indeed, he might have impressed an admissions officer with an unusual story of overcoming obstacles — a family rived by poverty and addiction in a forgotten corner of the country.
I wonder: Why do people look at Vance’s life story and achievements and see a vice president and they look at Harris’s life story and achievements and see a D.E.I. candidate?
Polgreen’s inclusion of legacy admits, who are almost by definition children of privilege, muddies the water here but the larger point is interesting.
Objectively, Harris was considerably more qualified for the Presidency when she was chosen than Vance is now. She had served 7 years as a big city DA, six as state Attorney General, and almost four years as a United States Senator. He spent four years as a junior Marine public affairs specialist and has been in the Senate for a year and a half. She had 56 years of life experience at inauguration; he’ll have 40.
At the same time, yes, I think Vance’s “diversity” is more impressive than hers. Yes, being a woman and, especially, Afro-Jamaican-Indian present significant challenges even today. But she was also born into privilege. Both of her parents are highly-educated professionals with elite pedigrees (both with UC-Berkley PhDs). While perhaps too much is made of it, Vance’s up-by-the-bootstraps story is real and earned.
Further, while it’s hard to fathom Donald Trump’s mental processes, I don’t think he or anyone on his staff said, “Hey, we need a white Appalachian under 40 to lend diversity to the ticket.” Rather, there were a handful of nominally qualified Republicans who had demonstrated sufficient loyalty to Trump and their merits were considered in some fashion. My guess is that Trump wanted to double down on his appeal to the White working class and thought Vance helped him more than Burgum, who had seemed to be the leading alternative.
So, no, I don’t think Vance is a “DEI candidate” in any meaningful sense.
Of course, at this point, neither is Harris. She’s the hands-on favorite for the Democratic nomination for a number of reasons, most notably because she’s the sitting Vice President. How she got there is largely irrelevant at this juncture.
WRT the four named choices for Veep on the Harris ticket, I like Beshear, but he has no chance of swinging Kentucky. I like Cooper, but I think his chances of swinging North Carolina would be less than the chances of either Kelly (Arizona) or Shapiro (Pennsylvania) to swing their states. I guess I would favor Shapiro, because PA going Democratic would put a major roadblock in Trump’s path to victory.
Trump and Vance are elites who implausibly (laughably) tell the base, “I am just like you,” and the base swallows it whole. Recall the moment George HW Bush’s campaign tried to show him as “just like you” and sent him to a supermarket where he was dazzled by the cashier’s scanner? Do you think Trump or Vance would react any differently if they had to actually shop for food? Trump chose Vance because JD is a kindred asshole and has already said that had he been VP on 1/6/21 he would have put the stick into the spokes that Pence refused to do.
In a very real sense every VP pick is a DEI candidate. A president picks someone who gives them access to something they would otherwise have difficulty reaching. For Pence it was Evangelical “Christians”. For Cheney it was the levers of power in the Old Guard. For Gore it was the institutional knowledge and power (inside the beltway, if you will). Roosevelt actively despised Truman but let party officials steamroll him into the position, most likely to attract wealthy donors who realized Roosevelt’s declining health meant the VP would take over and who didn’t like Henry Wallace’s liberal politics.
It is fair to say that the sole political purpose of every single VP pick is diversity and inclusion.
Ticket balancing has always been a DEI exercise. It is just that the right wing are masters at demonizing any terms they don’t like whether it is DEI, CRT, social emotional learning. And the rest of the country is always in a defensive crouch in defending decent ideas.
Yes, Mike Pence was a DEI choice: A man of God balancing the Tool of Satan. It worked.
@SC_Birdflyte:
I like Beshear – there was piece about him at LGM.
Shapiro raises Israel-Gaza as an issue, which I think an undesirable distraction.
@SC_Birdflyte:
I like Beshear – there was piece about him at LGM.
Shapiro raises Israel-Gaza as an issue, which I think an undesirable distraction.
(I don’t understand this double posting crap, the second time in two days).
X-cuse me, but I have (I think) some personal knowledge of this, combined with things I’ve read.
I am about 75% sure that Harris’s parents were my neighbors in an old house converted to a four-plex in Berkeley when I was a graduate student. Although students were better off in those days, we were hardly wealthy. Her parents divorced when she was relatively young, and she and her sister lived with their mother, who was indeed a professional, but single mothers back then did not have an easy life. Even a Ph.D. from Berkeley does not equal wealth.
@MarkedMan:
This.
I would add that in a country where more than half the population is women and in a society that is trending toward majority-minority within 30 years, race & gender seem more appropriate balancing considerations than evangelicalism, levers of power, or geography.
While perhaps too much is made of it, Vance’s up-by-the-bootstraps story is real and earned.
Sorry, but Vance’s rise is so clearly not earned, and that’s why his memoir was torched by anybody with a brain who came from a similar background. He’s obviously a smart guy but he decided to enter the right-wing welfare circuit. With the same background as a liberal he would be just another lawyer from Yale who nobody knows about. It’s like arguing that Hunter Biden really needed to be on some corporation’s board while getting 500K.
I like what Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said earlier this year when accused of being a “DEI” politician: “Duly Elected & Inaugurated.”
DEI is one of those terms that’s abused so much it’s almost meaningless. It’s identity politics. It has always dominated GOP politics.
Steve
Adding on to the JD Vance fairytale: he was not from Appalachia, and his family was solidly middle class.
Also, he benefited from massive financial aid to go to Yale Law School.
@Barry: His drug abuser, single mother was definitely poor. His grandparents were at best lower middle class. Both sets of grandparents were from Appalachia but moved to Ohio for work. Vance never claimed otherwise, just that his regular visits to Kentucky—and their Kentucky upbringing—greatly influenced his upbringing.
I liked the Vance that wrote the book and first presented himself as a political candidate. I very much detest what he had morphed into. But we shouldn’t pretend he’s a child of privilege.
James,
I have an issue with the way this phrasing impacts every other part of your piece. It seems like you are saying that, because sex and skin color are happenstance, any challenges society presents based on those characteristics are not real and overcoming social and economic barriers society erects because of them shouldn’t impact one’s view of another person attaining success.
A few years ago, Zendaya made a video after she and a friend left a high end department store–Saks or Nordstrom. She recounted that store staff followed them around the whole time they were shopping. Here, you have this tall young woman, one of the most strikingly beautiful women in the world, who cannot shop in a store without being considered a theft threat. Granted, she was not nearly as famous then as now, but the point still stands.
I also have been followed around stores, because I have long hair, a beard, and mostly wear t shirts and jeans. For people who know me, I look to them like a mad scientist or a philosophy professor. Strangers either think I look like a rock star, Jesus, or, most often, a threat.
The point I’m making here is that I, a white man, have had that experience once or twice. Harris, Zendaya, @DeD, @Eddie, and @DK all have to deal with that every day, every place.
I can cut my hair, shave, and throw on a collared shit. None of them can do a damn thing about the characteristics that mark them as an implicit threat.
So, regardless of economic privilege, anything that Harris earned was earned with articifial challenges added by assholes.
I raise this issue, because your priors are showing. A while back, you wrote in a piece that interectionality seems obvious. But intellectually grasping something is different from being able to see it in the world.
I applaud you for the former. I urge you to get better at applying it to the latter.
I would also like to note that Harris, as an Afro-Jamaican-Indian woman with a Jewish spouse, is presumed to pick a white Christian male as her running mate, which will limit her options considerably. Though governors of the two largest swing states, both Whitmer of Michigan and Shapiro of Pennsylvania are likely ruled out for the VP slot. “Some DEI, but not too much for comfort” is actually robbing the Democratic ticket of two of the most dynamic young leaders in the party.
Here’s more about Harris’s childhood. Not impoverished, but not the lap of luxury James is implying.
And, since I was a woman in that job market, ask me about what her mother’s experience in getting a job must have been. She got a job at the Rad Lab, which at the time, offered a fairer deal than the private companies.
@Scott F.:
Shapiro is one of the top possibilities.
I do agree, though, that it’s almost certainly going to be a white male.
@Kurtz:
I was always darkly amused watching store security follow some obviously middle class Black guy around while ignoring me. Or cops on the boardwalk in Ocean City eyeballing whichever minority had not gotten the memo about Ocean City*, while giving me the in-group nod-of-acceptance. Not to mention employers who’d confidently hire me for a job rife with opportunity for mischief. Yes, yes you can trust me to handle the cash, see how pale I am?
If you’re going to be a fugitive from justice, it’s a good idea to be White.
On topic: as noted by several people, all Veeps are DEI cases. It’s really their primary job to represent whichever ethnic/religious/racial/geographical demo will contribute to victory. Dick Cheney being an unusual case in that he anointed himself Veep.
*Ocean City MD, a beach town fed by vacationers from Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia, was in those days, about 99% White.
Vance brings diversity to the Republican ticket, the sort of diversity that matters to GOPs generally and Trump especially. He brings tech billionaire money. Political Wire quotes (paywalled) WSJ,
This touches on a pet peeve of mine. There’s been a whole lot of silly punditry about “Why Vance? He’s a clone of Trump, he brings nothing to the table.” He brought money. That’s obviously why he was chosen. Why won’t the press talk about money? There’s a whole lot that goes on behind the green curtain and the supposedly liberal MSM choose to be part of the curtain.
They have, however, noted the 70 million and rising in small donations Ds have raked in since Biden endorsed Harris. I think the D voters have spoken.
@Cheryl Rofer:
Yeah, but in real America having parents who are culturally literate and educated translates as privileged and elite, even if you aren’t white or male or a member of a nuclear family and are struggling to get by. It’s like trying to calm a 5′ 8″ man with tons of hangups about women who gets rejected by a woman because he isn’t tall.
@Kurtz:
It’s like Henry Louis Gates getting arrested for entering his own home in Cambridge. Nobody screams Harvard prof more than Gates, and yet when it happened half of the country was down to believe that he could have been a burglar. It’s like a cop arresting a man who sounds and dresses like Bill Buckley outside a house in Greenwich. Either you busted the owner or the world’s most famous jewel thief, but it’s not some random criminal.
@Michael Reynolds: By all accounts, nothing has changed in Ocean City. Never been there myself, but the incidents keep a comin’ and are reported with some frequency.
A thought.
I don’t think Trump cares one whit about Vance’s background save as a prop. I don’t think that he wants Vance around to better understand Appalachia or to make poor whites feel represented.
I do think that Biden was trying to increase the representation of women and persons of color when he chose Harris. And I think that Biden and others do take seriously the need for actual representation.
I think this is an incredibly important difference, even if one can make an abstract argument that Vance lends a type of diversity that has value to the ticket.
@steve:
It’s a way to say the N-word without using the letter N.
@Steven L. Taylor: Actually picking a vice president is one of the few concessions to the Constitutional process that Trump has made. I suspect he would happily run by himself – he alone – if he thought he could get away with it. I don’t doubt for a second that Trump might try to sub in someone else (Don Jr.?) if he was somehow incapacitated but still had a say in the decision.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I go even farther on Trump — he picks VP candidates on the basis of (a) he can’t fire them after the election and (b) he’ll have to be around them a lot of the time. Watching him from the time he was just some guy from Queens with some inherited money trying to become a celebrity, it’s straightforward to say who that person won’t be. Trump won’t pick a woman; he won’t pick someone who is Black; he won’t pick a Latino; he won’t pick a Southerner; he won’t pick someone from west of the Mississippi River. Vance fits nicely in the hole that is left: straight, white, conservative, male from the eastern part of the Midwest.
I have a feeling it’s going to be Harris-Buttigieg.
@Michael Cain: I think Trump could have plausibly picked a Black white supremacist, or some other white supremacist of color.
Enrique Tarrio, perhaps, although he wouldn’t be available for campaigning until 2040 (sooner with good behavior, but not soon enough)
@Joe:
Sure. But that has nothing to do with the notion that he picked Vance for some representational purpose.
@CSK: That would truly surprise me.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Various news sources are reporting Buttigieg as a top contender.
@Gustopher:
Is Clayton Bigsby available?
@CSK: I always take such speculation with a grain of salt.
Don’t get me wrong, I like him and wouldn’t be upset with him as the veep nominee.
But it strikes me as unlikely they would double-down on the first Black female top of the ticket with the first openly gay veep nominee. Not to mention a cabinet secretary without other major items on his resume.
I mean, maybe they go all-in on the diversity ticket, but as much as I personally might think that a noble and worthwhile approach, I have my doubts about the American electorate’s response.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I think the Convicted Felon made his pick on the quality and level of orange ass kissing, Vance is practically part of the Felon’s gut microbiome by now.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Beat me to it–agreed on all counts.
He also doesn’t potentially help deliver a key swing state in a way Shapiro or Kelly does.
I doubt any Gaza baggage would hurt a Harris-Shapiro ticket enough for it to be a non-starter.
I think Kelly is also a fine choice.
I wasn’t looking directly at the TV when I heard some male voice (TV talking head? Political expert? Other?) say that Kamala Harris is the first Black woman to run for President USA. I immediately yelled Shirley Chisholm at the TV. I don’t think that they heard me.
How about this. Republicans believe White males to be a discriminated against group. So by choosing a White male they were choosing on the basis of DEI, just their own bizarro world version.
But did Trump think this? Nah. Trump thought nothing but that Vance is a bootlick. That’s about all that ever thinks about – am I being obeyed, is my ass being kissed. That and if it’s a woman, could he fuck her?
Until very recently, every major Presidential candidate only considered white men as their running mates; they just didn’t necessarily say it out loud. It’s objectively wrong to say “Biden is the first candidate who narrowed the pool of potential Veeps by race and gender” so let’s not act like he did something unique or problematic just because he used different criteria to narrow and was transparent about it.
@Mister Bluster: A while back I asked ChatGPT “Who was the first African American on a United States presidential ticket?” I thought they might say Obama, and I would have been like, okay. The term “presidential ticket” often is used with the unstated assumption it’s talking about major parties only. So that wouldn’t have been that big an error. But I thought they might mention Jesse Jackson or Shirley Chisholm or some earlier example. I knew the technical answer: It was Frederick Douglass, who was selected as running mate to Victoria Woodhull in 1872, who happened to be the first woman to run for president. Douglass had no involvement with the convention that nominated her, they just went ahead and did it without asking him. But, technically, that made him the first African American on a presidential ticket in US history.
But you know what ChatGPT’s answer was? Kamala Harris.
@Kurtz:
Whatever the impact, it’s baked in at this point, because Kamala is part of the Biden Admin, and it’s very unlikely she’s going to pick anyone who differs substantively from the admin’s official position on the conflict. I suspect we’ll soon be hearing cries of Genocide Kam, even though that doesn’t have quite the same ring.
@Kazzy:
Generally true, though Hoover’s vp Charles Curtis was significantly of Native American descent and spent part of his life on a reservation. How widely this was known at the time is unclear.
@CSK:
I commented back in the 2020 campaign that Harris-Buttigieg would be my dream ticket if the objective was to get the Trumpists’ collective heads to explode. A woman of color partnered with gay ex-military man would be so “triggering” for the Anti-Woke.
But, I agree with @Steven L. Taylor that this is very unlikely based on my “some DEI, but not too much for comfort” formula.
Besides, Buttigieg is wonderfully placed as Secretary of Infrastructure Spending and he doesn’t have to be on the ticket to do what he does best. Simply as a surrogate of the campaign, he used his appearance on Bill Maher last week for the most artful take-down of the cynical JD Vance. Look up the video – it was a thing of beauty.
@CSK, @Steven L. Taylor: , @Kurtz, @Scott F.:
FWIW, I just posted on the VP question.
I didn’t include Mayor Pete in my pull. I know some folks are talking about it, but like Steven, Kurtz, and Scott F. I think he’s a longshot at this moment.
@Cheryl Rofer:
Exactly. A rented duplex on Bancroft in the 60s is a long way from “privilege”, though Harris certaily had some of the advantages that come along with highly educated parents with professional careers.
So James. is this the party line? Harris is a San Francisco/California elite, a child of privilege? People like Cheryl and I who have deep east bay roots and were actually around back then, know better.
@Matt Bernius: it really can’t be Mayor Pete, as he is gay and that would kill the sexual tension. And Americans like to vote for the ticket with the most sexual tension.
Oh, don’t tell me you never noticed it before. How could anyone see how Obama looked at Biden and not see it?
Really, Biden brings the tension with anyone, although it’s been lagging a little as he has been looking a little frail.
2016 seems like an outlier, since there wasn’t that much between Trump and Pence, but can anyone even remember Clinton’s running mate? No. He may have been a man, but he also might have been a mannequin. There was nothing there.
And the Trump-Pence campaign worked with what they had and came out with this awesome logo with the T penetrating the P.
http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2016/news/160711/trump-logo-800.jpg
@Modulo Myself:
Certainly having “parents who are culturally literate and educated” certainly offers advantages and opportunities for a child, but “elite?” I don’t think so. When Harris was growing up, the truly privileged kids were busy growing up in Atherton, Belvedere and Pacific Heights, not in the Berkeley flats.
@Kylopod:
This makes perfect sense, but despite that I think it might be wrong. My 27 year old daughter is much more politically tuned in than average and she and her (Jewish) girlfriend are constantly posting pictures from Pro-Palestinian marches in NYC, where they live. Very upset with Biden’s stance on the Israeli/Palestinian war, but was reluctantly and unenthusiastically going to vote for him anyway. Now she is all in on Harris, practically bouncing on the edge of the seat with enthusiasm. She tells us her Insta and Tik Tok is completely blowing up with an outpouring of Harris love. On an intellectual level she knows Harris isn’t going to have a different Israel policy than Ol’ Joe, but on emotional level that doesn’t matter. In fact, she adamantly told me “Kamala is Brat”. What more needs to be said?
@Kylopod: I voted for Eldridge Cleaver in 1968.
@DK: That would work up until the moment they ask him to show them his face—
@Gustopher:
I forgot about the numerous pictures of Biden smelling Obama’s hair. How could you not mention that?
Is that logo official? I don’t recall it.
@anjin-san:
I have no idea what the “party line” is. Of which party? Aside from the occasional memeorandum or social media link, I’m pretty much a consumer of the mainline press.
No, I jus think that as a fact of biography a child of two Berkley PhD-possessing professional parents is more privileged than a child of a single mom drug addict who gave up said child for years on end and shunted him off to his redneck grandparents. She didn’t need to spend four years in the Marines to go to college, for example.
@James Joyner: One thing that struck me about Vance’s book was the section about his family when his mom was working and his stepdad I believe drove a truck, they were pulling in over $100k a year. That was a huge sum for rural Ohio. They were just really irresponsible with spending and ended up broke.
@Kazzy:
That. Republicans are the Party that plays identity politics. it’s only possible to believe otherwise if you don’t think vanilla is a flavor.
@Jen: I read it shortly after it came out and, mostly, it just struck me that they were all toxic people for whom he held a fierce loyalty. Even if they had been relatively normal middle-class people, as the income level suggests, there’s just a different class dynamic when the primary breadwinner drives a truck than when they’re a biomedical scientist at Berkley, even if they make similar incomes.
None of this is to suggest that Harris didn’t face challenges growing up or earn her various positions over time. But she didn’t grow up in Watts, either.
@James Joyner:
So, we’re to ignore the fact that Vance attended the elite-by-any-standard Yale Law School?
@gVOR10: Ooh, good line about the vanilla. I’m using it.
@al Ameda: I thought the GOP story was Vance was so affected by 9/11 that he enlisted asap. (In media relations).
On Mayor Pete, I like his skills – he’d eat Vance alive in a debate. But aside from being gay and not from a swing state, he’s been mayor and held a cabinet post. He hasn’t been elected to any statewide or national seat and that may be a liability.
@James Joyner:
Obviously. That does not make the kid from the Berkeley Flats “Privileged” except relative to a kid that is underprivileged. Considing that Trump truly was born into privilege and inherited nearly half a billion dollars, it seems to me that any connection between “Harris” and “privileged” in connection with the race is either nonsense or designed to paint Harris as something she’s not.
Why not just say that she enjoyed some advantages that Vance did not? That would be accurate.
I grew up in the Bay Area a few years ahead of Harris, and there are actually a few things that connect us – both born at Kaiser Oakland, Cal family, Hastings (my dad was an alumnus). My youth was a light year from hers, in a very nice home in the Marin hills with all the trimmings. That being said, I never – at least to my knowledge – even met a kid my age who I would consider to be a child of true elites when I was growing up. There was no overlap between our upper middle class world and places like Atherton and Sea Cliff.
@anjin-san: Oh, for sure Trump grew up in considerably more affluent circumstances. And, frankly, I don’t care much one way or the other in terms of any of the candidates’ fitness for office. I’d prefer Harris to Trump or Vance.
I’m simply reacting to the notion presented by Polgreen that Harris’ gender and race are comparable in difficulty to Vance’s circumstances. I think he had a harder hill to climb. But I don’t give extra credit at the POTUS/VPOTUS level.
@James Joyner:
Maybe another way to put it: economic class is not the only sort of privilege. And it seems like you are focusing on an obvious one, and weighing it too heavily against the sort that is easy to deny for white males.
Vance can shake his ‘hillbilly roots’. Nothing can change the color of Harris’ skin. She will have to deal with bigotry her entire life.
I think the people who’ve benefited the most from affirmative action are judges from the Federalist Society. These are some of these least qualified candidates in the legal profession.
@James Joyner:
I find the way you rationalize things fascinating. No she didn’t have to go the Marines. She had to earn scholarships and go into debt. Neither one of them got a free ride.
Hmm. Well, neither you or I have ever been black, or a woman. The most impressive person I know is a black woman. Her accomplishments and the quality of her character are truly remarkable. And despite that, she will always know that moment of fear when she sees a cop car in the rear view mirror.
Sorry, but you and I can’t possibly get the challenges of being black in America, or the even steeper slope a black woman has to navigate, every day of her life.