President Trump’s use of the word to describe Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick, Kamala Harris, plays off a hurtful stereotype with a decades-long history.
Kamala Harris may become the first Black woman elected as vice president, but for now she’s still being slotted into a well-worn mold, as President Trump and his allies seek to cast her as “a mad woman.”
Within hours of her joining Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket on Tuesday, Mr. Trump branded her “extraordinarily nasty,” and then “so angry,” as the rhetoric ratcheted up. By Thursday, a Trump campaign fund-raising email called her “the meanest” senator.
All of it played on a racist trope that goes back generations in American culture, and has a complicated history in forging gender identity, power and class. The “angry Black woman” remains a cultural and social fixture, a stereotype that has been used to denigrate artists, athletes and political figures. Continue reading.