Kamala Harris and the problem of affirmative action

In lauding Joe Biden’s promise to fill the upcoming vacancy on the US Supreme Court with a black woman, last week the commentator Jonathan Capehart effused on PBS NewsHour that any black woman was bound to duplicate the retiring Justice Stephen Breyer’s famous pragmatism, because ‘there is no more pragmatic people in the world, of necessity, than a black woman (sic)’. With no other knowledge of the prospective nominee beyond her race and sex, Capehart trotted out confidently that she will ‘probably be more impressive, have more qualifications, be more brilliant than the folks who have come in before her, because people used her race to downgrade and belittle and not think much of her simply because she was black’. With any black female pick, ‘we all know from jump that that person is more than qualified, is more than worthy, is more than able to sit on the bench’.

That’s because all black women are the same. Given that they’re all the same in good ways, this casual stereotyping is OK.

Let’s digress. When promoting my 2020 novel The Motion of the Body Through Space, I had a bracing encounter on a Sky books show, which I’d blithely expected to be a cake walk. On meeting the hosts, I hastily recalibrated, for one of the women was large and tall with a shaven head. Her bearing was intimidating, her floor-length gown a shimmering purple. Oh, and did I forget to mention? She was black.

I’d ordinarily take all this in my stride — 5ft 2in and shrinking, I’m used to other people towering over me — except that one element of the new novel was a bit too likely to displease the purple one. Sure enough, the formidable presenter took immediate exception to a secondary character, who is not, she claimed, well-roundedly drawn.