Melissa Harris-Perry began her presentation with an apology.
“I fear there could be spelling errors in the slides,” she warned the audience gathered at the Radcliffe Institute on October 23 to hear the 2014 Rothschild Lecture, entitled “Who’s Choosin’ Who? Race, Gender, and the New American Politics.” After they laughed, she added, “That’s not a joke. I have an eight-month-old, and a TV show.”
The host of the eponymous MSNBC news and talk program Melissa Harris-Perry is also a columnist for The Nation. She is a chaired professor of politics and international affairs at her alma mater, Wake Forest University, where she also founded and directs a research center on gender, race, and politics in the South. In 2009, she was the youngest woman ever to give Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures; she titled her series “Of the Meaning of Progress: Measuring Black Citizenship,” and their subject became that of her 2011 book, Sister Citizen, which analyzes how stereotypes about black women affect public policy and political engagement.
Harris-Perry brought “a refreshing electricity to the occasion,” said Lawrence D. Bobo, Du Bois professor of the social sciences, and chair of the Department of African and African American Studies. Bobo, who had introduced her lectures six years ago, also introduced her on Thursday. He recalled that when he first met her, at the beginning of her career at the University of Chicago, she was already being talked about as the “young scholar who could do everything.” It was truly rare, he said, to see a scholar who could speak fluently about Zora Neale Hurston and regression coefficients, “as deep a dive into nerd land as one might ever want to experience.”
Harris-Perry prefaced her lecture by calling it “relatively flat-footed.” In the classroom, she would strive to complicate the term “politics,” she said—but especially in the waning days before November 4, she would limit her discussion to a definition of politics that she ordinarily “disdained”: elections and voting.
Instead, her talk would complicate the typical understanding of the electorate itself. Peppering her quick-fire analysis with riffs on Confederate flag apparel, seeing then Illinois state senator Barack Obama wearing an “unfortunate” pair of shorts, and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 prospects (and whether she was “too far north” to joke about them), Harris-Perry began with a seemingly unromantic view of democracy. Her thesis: a democracy is valuable in a number of ways, but “the fundamental value is about being a loser.” If, in a democracy, a group expects to lose as often as it wins—and, in the case of some marginalized groups, far more often—they can “lose without fearing that the winners take all.”
We often think about enfranchisement according to an “identity narrative,” she explained. Our understanding of the history of the vote fixes on the Fourteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, and this narrative tells a story of progress: a democracy made “safer” for groups who were often its “losers,” because they could cast a vote. High voter turnout among black and women voters, she said, shows these groups taking what she called “good care” of their access to the ballot box. Black women voters were decisive in electing Barack Obama in 2008, and that electoral year seemed to be a “moment” for women in politics: Hillary Clinton neck-and-neck with Obama in the primaries; Rachel Maddow rising to prominence; Sarah Palin named as vice-presidential candidate; Katie Couric grilling her in primetime.
But four years later, “We were having conversations that were bizarre,” she said, referencing 2012 stories about Todd Akin, Sandra Fluke, and party sloganeering about reproductive rights. Beyond the headlines, in fact, more abortion restrictions were legislated between 2011 and 2013 than during the entire previous decade. Understanding this shift, Harris-Perry suggested, required a more complex portrait of voters: not just grouping them as “women,” for example, but asking, “Which women?” In 2012, she pointed out, Romney won the majority of married women’s votes, while Obama won what she said she liked to call “spouse-free women.” Race and marital status proved better predictors than gender alone.
Harris-Perry then turned to present battles over enfranchisement, waged on the grounds of a different set of amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment, for example, specifically allowed felon disenfranchisement—and this provision has had disproportionate racial effects, barring a large number of black men from exerting influence in elections. A push to repeal the seemingly uncontroversial Seventeenth Amendment, which established direct voting for U.S. senatorial races, serves as a reminder of what she called “the foundational angst about popular governance,” which fears “too much democracy.” In her home state of North Carolina, new voting restrictions and voter I.D. requirements have been likened to the poll taxes banned by the Twenty-fourth Amendment. Harris-Perry, who had yet to receive her new driver’s license in the mail, said she was unsure if she’d be allowed to cast a vote on election day without it. Just to be safe, she would carry her passport and Social Security card—and, she joked, clips from her show—to the polls.
The question-and-answer portion of the evening centered on the speaker’s career. The transition from speaking in the classroom to speaking on camera was one that she continued to negotiate, she said. She might once have thought of herself as “a marginalized voice shouting into the wilderness,” but now she had a national platform, televised weekly. Her position had changed. She had to take care not to undermine her credibility by generating needless controversy. Whenever a segment or stray sentence of hers drew criticism, Harris-Perry said she had to decide which controversies were worthwhile—“good hills to die on”—and which warranted a retraction.
Harris-Perry also reflected on her personal and professional life, explaining the “structural realities” that enabled her career—integrated primary schools, in the brief period after pivotal Supreme Court rulings but before white flight; a thriving academic job market—and advising students to seek out good mentors: “Find your lions.” She told the audience how her father, the first dean of African-American affairs at the University of Virginia, had signed all of his children’s birthday cards with the words, “The struggle continues,” and then, “Daddy.” Now, as an adult, Harris-Perry said, she understood this sentiment as a lesson in “political humility”—allowing her to admit to not having all the answers, and serving as a reminder that “no partisan story is sufficient, no identity story is sufficient” to fully account for politics either past or present. These words, she said, now feel like a gift.
