PRISM: The Fated Failures of a Harris-Walz Ticket
PRISM is a storytelling series amplifying the experiences, creativity, and imagination of Black, Brown, and Indigenous storytellers based in Kentucky.
By Drew Webb
Before this most recent presidential election, I’ve never wondered if shock is a contingent factor in heartbreak. Surprise can twist a knife but cannot wield that blade alone. It’s historically a recipe for disappointment to sink your faith in institutions built and maintained on marginalization and othering. All the same, I woke up on November 6th and sighed. If abolition lives in dreaming imaginative, new futures, what resides on the other side of the unsettling moment your stomach swoops and you feel yourself free-falling on the way to rest?
All around us is a tempting version of events; historical revisionism works, selling a fantasy like seduction. In this fiction, Donald Trump is an outlier event and a singular parasite, preying on American blind spots and agitating dangerous fervor to new lows, rather than an exact culmination of American ideals. If my vignette view were limited to out-of-touch op-eds and major news networks, another Trump presidency would be the whole disease, rather than just another symptom. As it stands, an active pandemic links hands with mounting international economic crises and cancerous white supremacy in an ensemble cast. In another life, the sandman would sprinkle dreams—no state-sponsored evils behind my eyelids, only bleating sheep.
All this being said, the Harris-Walz loss wasn’t just the result of societal failures and historical precedent. Here I think of Democratic platitudes and empty pandering. Sister Nancy Pelosi donned a kente cloth and took a performative knee before pushing any meaningful legislation or policies that would advance Black Americans’ material conditions. I sit here on Christmas, the iconography of a manger scene in every peripheral, while Jesus of Nazareth’s birthplace is under siege. Democrats voted for the white phosphorus and the bombs leveling The Gaza Strip, too. All while continuing a demonstrably unsuccessful strategy, wherein Democratic leadership does not have to work to deserve constituents’ electoral faith, but instead, voters should place all their trust in the fact that they aren’t Donald Trump’s Republican Party. This strategy wasn’t successful when Clinton lost in 2016 and barely secured Biden his 2020 term. “Kamala is Brat” but not enough to denounce Zionism or answer the very fair questions around her carceral record from her time prosecuting in California.
I disagree with some of the notions about her campaign’s reliance on identity politics. Media outlets focused on aspects of her identity far more than she ever seemed to herself. In particular, I’d argue the intersections of her identity presented hindrances she was combatting at multiple turns. She is a child of immigrants who lost to the candidate running with a major platform of mass deportation. A woman who ran while reproductive rights in this country regress further back than they’ve been my whole life. Trump won the popular vote, going on nonsensical tangents and cycling easily disproved lies while she was arguably the most professionally qualified presidential candidate in the running.
Harris hails from an old vanguard of respectability politics. It glimmers in the essence of her public persona, and undercurrents every aspect of her media strategy. Her capitulation to anti-Blackness in this way isn’t some sole sin of her political career, though. It lives on in utterances of “pull your pants up” to Black boys sagging and mothers who weep for joy and praise God when we take out facial piercings. As personally resentful as I am of these attitudes, they do not exist in a vacuum. At a point in our history, these were necessary tools of survival.
Historically, respectability politics were not grounded in their adherents’ right-leaning principles or ethical subscriptions. It was a means to an end: living another day, making it home in the evening. Racism and capitalist white supremacy as they manifest in America are the kind of cultural trauma that embeds scar tissue into the fundamental fabric of a nation. In the case of Kamala Harris, watching her campaign felt like a woman between a bedrock of cultural policing and the hard place of being in the pivotal moment when the American people needed a democratic candidate who would take definitive stances. Realistically, how was she meant to come out and break faith in Democratic leadership insisting the country is doing better than it ever has, while every day new horrors unfold? In my experience, and the Black women and femmes in my community, that’s the kind of talk where lip-service leftists and proud centrists turn on you with quickness; if they can’t outright fault your positions, they’ll take issue with your tone. Suddenly the same cadences you’ve always used are “hostile and threatening.” The table flips like battleground states and beneath it, etched carvings likening you to a beastly thing, “Jezebel,” on the tips of tongues.
Do not take this as an attempt to absolve Kamala Harris of her faults and failings. That would be reductive and condescending. And still, these facts are inextricable from her loss in November, because she didn’t just lose in 2024. This is the latest skirmish in a conflict spanning back to 1619 and the first Black hostages enslaved here: the age-old American wound, still infected and festering. If anything, this election simply affirmed that any salvation from these systems will not visit in electoral solutions or sweet dreams. There is no polished presentation that would beg liberation. Perhaps the lesson is to be unpalatable and say the disagreeable thing because white supremacy is a living, breathing body either way. I truly believe Kamala Harris was doomed in either case—this election, at least. Learning from the moment, if your fundamental existence is a bad taste in someone’s mouth, you might as well be a difficult pill to swallow.
Drew Webb is a poet and essayist based in Louisville, Kentucky. Their work—in all forms—is grounded in speaking to the personal as the political and maintaining a fundamental musicality and rhythm to their prose.
Webb has released collections of poetry, with work appearing in various publications, ranging from Carmichaels on Frankfort to The Washington Post’s The Lily. Currently, they are working on their first novel-length project.
Instagram: @drewwh0