Kamala Harris Isn’t a DEI Hire

One of the earliest Republican attacks on Vice President and Candidate Harris is that she is what’s known as a ‘DEI hire.’ An entirely racist and sexist attack, the aforementioned white male member of Congress who made these remarks (and is himself unremarkable) began his statement by pointing to Harris being a black woman and asking the what-aboutism question of other types of woman (ie white…he actually said as much) that were looked over in favor of the less-qualified Harris.

First of all, if anyone with a brain thinks Vance is qualified to be Vice President and Harris isn’t, they are either blind, shamelessly biased, or misogynoir’s. Both first-term senators at the time of their nominations, Harris held several state-level elected offices before her election to the US Senate (including AG of California) while Vance had never previously held elected office and has seemed to grift his way into fame and fortune (thanks in large part to billionaire Peter Thiel).

Second of all, let’s talk about what DEI actually means.

An acronym for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, DEI refers to “practices and policies intended to support people who come from varying backgrounds and give them the resources they need to thrive in the workplace,” according to HR expert Katie Heinz. Essentially, this framework emphasizes the importance of having a variety of voices at the table and creating conditions that distribute opportunity more fairly than workplaces/educational institutions/public spaces have traditionally done.

Think of it this way; there’s been an unfair advantage that white men (especially straight, cisgender, and economically well-off) have had over others in accessing opportunity, such as being hired for jobs. Biases both conscious and implicit have caused employers to favor white male candidates, which has resulted in a disproportionately white and male leadership landscape in the workforce.

So, what can we do? Consciously institute change. One example of this is explicitly hiring candidates who are diverse. Doing so doesn’t erase the overlooked women, people of color, disabled, and other minority groups who have been unfairly passed over before, but it does ensure that they get more seats at the table going forward.

Think that sounds hokey? Imagine a world in which there was instead an effort to give mass layoffs to white men, in order to make space for diversity. We’re not going to randomly fire a bunch of white dudes who may have, through no fault of their own, been given an unfair advantage. But what we can do, is mitigate this from happening in the future by deciding to give positions of power to those who have had an unfair disadvantage in accessing them.

What also has to be considered is that this framework is meant to address systems of oppression systemically. The impacts it has on individual people or positions are not DEI in and of itself, but merely the echos of its effects. An individual white man who is passed over for a woman of color might not be ‘fair,’ but neither was it fair for the hundreds of women of color that came before them to be chosen in favor of choosing white men.

This also has no bearing on actual qualifications; both the white man and woman of color in this scenario could be, and presumably usually are, equally qualified for the position. DEI isn’t about handing opportunities to people who haven’t earned them, or hiring any woman of color just to simply check a box (even suggesting this is actually conflating DEI with affirmative action). It’s about airing on the side of diversity, when you have qualified candidates who are diverse.

Kamala Harris was chosen as Vice President not because she’s a black woman; one look at her resume shows how preposterous that idea is. She was chosen because she was qualified. Biden committed to choosing a woman as his running mate very early into his candidacy, because of the stubborn glass ceiling that had prevented the most qualified Presidential candidate in history from winning the electoral college (Hillary Clinton) just one cycle prior. As one of the white men in a very diverse, crowded Democratic primary field in 2020, he showed his commitment to social justice through his commitment to make a woman the second in command.

Harris, a woman who ran in this very primary race, earned her spot through the hard work she’d put into politics for two decades prior. Although she did not end up fairing well against her challengers (in part from misinformation about her record as a prosecutor spread by Tulsi Gabbard), she was unquestioningly qualified to run. She wasn’t given the opportunity, because of her genitalia. Was she the right person at the right time? Absolutely. Were there other people who could have been given the opportunity that were equally qualified? Of course. That still doesn’t mean she was given a chance she didn’t deserve; it doesn’t mean she didn’t earn her position as Vice President. It means Biden was using his power to offer her the opportunity that so many women of color before her were not given. It means she finally had a door opened for her that so many men, including Biden himself, had opened for him. It means she was given a chance. What she did or didn’t do with it, was up to her.

To suggest that Harris is a DEI hire is suggesting that she hasn’t done the work, that she’s being granted some sort of favor simply because of what race and gender she happens to be. That there were other, better, options, but she fit the identity mark that the Democrats were going for. This couldn’t be further from the truth nor a bigger insult to the legitimacy of Harris’s career. She earned her spot. There’s no one waiting in the wings whose better, as her record breaking fundraising has shown, as well as her overwhelming unification and energizing of her party. To suggest otherwise is a thin veil of racism and sexism; according to this logic, women and people of color can’t possibly be more qualified, more ready, or more right for a position than their white male counterparts. If Harris is a woman of color, how could she then be anything other than a DEI hire? This places her in a box, where she’s solely defined by the color of her skin and her sex. It’s actually the very thing the Republic are accusing the Democrats of; discrimination.


Harris isn’t a DEI hire. She is the best person for the job.