There’s a great scene in the film A Few Good Men were Marine colonel Nathan are Jessup played by Jack Nicholson feels disrespected by the Chad Daniel Caffee played by Tom Cruise. Jessup is on the witness stand in a court martial of two Marines being defended by Kaffee. At one point, Jessup tries to leave the courtroom. Cathy stops him and tells him to sit down. Offended. Jessup insists on being addressed as Colonel. He says with indignation, quote, I think I’ve earned it. The military judge also Colonel reprimands Kaffee and tells them to address Jessup as Colonel Jessup then mouths off to the judge, and the judge reprimands him to he tells Jessup to address him as judge or your honor. The judge says quote, I’m quite sure I’ve earned it. You see, the judge is black. We get the joke. We can only imagine the life that he’s lived and how difficult his road has been. No doubt he has heard. Now matching Kamala Harris cast in the role of the judge, as a 59 year old black woman who has served as San Francisco District Attorney, California Attorney General, US senator and most recently as vice president, she has breathed, rarefied air. The higher you go, the more turbulence you run into.
If Harris had worked solely for the last 30 years and menial low prestige, low wage jobs that white men weren’t interested in, they would have left her alone. But she had the nerve to go after jobs that they wanted. And sometimes she beat them out for those positions. That bred anger and resentment. Those who came up short, couldn’t bring themselves to accept that they had done so because of some failing or shortcoming on their part. No, instead, it was much easier for them to tell themselves that they had been ripped off, cheated bamboozled. The whole game was they said to borrow a Trump phrase rigged. It was rigged by gender and race. And white males, well, they don’t stand a chance. All the breaks go to women and people of color. And if you ever face off against somebody who happens to be both a woman of color, well look out pal, you don’t stand a chance. By now, Harris must be used to white men, many of whom had easier lives and she did and are less deserving of what they have. She’s just these white men mansplaining to her what she didn’t earn
and doesn’t deserve. It’s rude, condescending and presumptuous. It’s also absurd, given that by virtue of being born, the right color and the right gender. White men are in large measure born on third base, and then they dance around like they’ve hit a triple. That’s where you would have found Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance, who are now suggesting that Harris has glided through life unfairly. Welcome to the DEI election. The acronym stands for diversity, equity and inclusion three otherwise harmless words that strike fear into the hearts of those who liked the status quo just the way it is, because they benefit from it.
I’ve been in the arena fighting the good fight against critics of race based preferences since the spring of 1985. That’s when white high school classmates with grades inferior to mine told me that I wouldn’t have been accepted to Harvard if I hadn’t been Mexican. Given that the Supreme Court recently struck down race conscious college admissions, I did not have on this year’s bingo card that we’d be having yet another national therapy session for beleaguered white men. But here we are. White men led by Trump and Vance are going to spend the rest of this election depicting Harris as di Barbie.
Please, as the old saying goes, Ginger Rogers had to do everything that Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels. The same goes for Harris. Republicans underestimate her at their peril.
