Misogynoir: Election Results Reveal ‘Specific Hatred, Dislike, Distrust, and Prejudice Toward Black Women’

The sound and the fury of the 2024 elections have finally died down, and as the dust settles, media pundits have had a field day discussing the results. But back in the ancestral village of Shyamala Gopalan, the late mother of Vice President Kamala Harris, where there had been much excitement, the mood is one of somber despondency. Gopalan, whose family came from the southern Indian state of Tamilnadu, had immigrated to the United States in the 1960s, arriving first as a young college student who would go on to become a brilliant scientist and marry a fellow immigrant from Jamaica, Donald J. Harris, a brilliant academician in his own right. Their daughter Kamala Harris had already made a great success of her life even before she stepped into the political arena, earning a law degree, and then going on to become Attorney General of California (2011–17) and then serve in the U.S. Senate (2017–21).

Keeping her qualifications in mind, liberal feminist circles in the U.S. now query, “Where do we go from here, where a majority of the United States voted overwhelmingly for a candidate who is a threat to the very fabric of democracy? How do we reconcile the reality that an overqualified candidate, a Black and South Asian woman with multiple degrees and experience in all three branches of government, is still considered unqualified to lead this country?” (Ms. Magazine, November 2024). 

The point they miss is not that women are unable to win the popular vote in the US, because one woman did, in November 2016. Senator Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but missed the Presidency because she did not win sufficient seats in the Electoral College. Vice President Kamala Harris did not win the popular vote due to several factors. One of course is the rampant “misogynoir” in the country, which has unfortunately been ramped up by the Far Right, which has taken over the media rhetoric in the past decade. 

Intersectionality, a term originally used by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, was initially defined to describe how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics “intersect” with one another and overlap. A newer term, Misogynoir, coined by Communication theorist Moya Bailey in 2008 was developed to describe “the specific hatred, dislike, distrust, and prejudice directed toward Black women.” Misogynoir has been pervasive this election cycle, just as it was in 2020, with pundits questioning Harris’s readiness to take office and opponents taking outrageous digs at her racial and ethnic identity. 

Conservative activists have cast aspersions on her morals, a pervasive attack on African American women over the years, a misogynistic claim that’s often used against successful women to question whether they deserve the position that they’re in. These racist narratives seek to cast doubt on whether she’s eligible for office. It’s part of a long tradition of conservatives portraying nonwhite politicians as not being “real Americans” and therefore unfit to hold important political positions.

But an additional point that Bailey makes in her interview with Liz Hallgren of the Center for Media at Risk of the Annenberg School of Communication is the fact that the corporate media are owned by billionaires who are the ones who really call the shots. We see that now with the rise of Elon Musk who openly gave enormous amounts of money to buy votes. Musk has used X, the social media platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022, to unleash misinformation about immigration and make claims that are deceptive and impossible to verify.  The famed marketplace of ideas is no longer represented in the mainstream media. The ray of light is the fact that many journalists are outraged by these actions, and have dared to act on it. The resignations of many of the editorial board members of several newspapers demonstrate that it’s not about neutrality, but about the outsized weight that billionaires have in our electoral processes and in our news media. And that’s something we should all be very, very afraid of (Hallgren, 2024).

The second is that her campaign did not have sufficient time to rally the masses, as President Biden failed to step down until a mere three months ago. So Harris had to wing it, in a mere 100 days, much as was the case with the hapless Queen Anne Boleyn of Britain who reigned for a brief 100 days before she fell out of favor with the autocratic monarch Henry VIII and lost her crown and her life. Fortunately, Harris has only lost an election and at 60, can still give it another go in the next elections, if she is nominated by her party.

The third is, as pointed out by Senator Bernie Sanders, that the Democratic Party had abandoned its base, and were perceived by them as elitist and catering only to the urban population. Its move to win the votes of the elite Republicans while ignoring the working classes infuriated the latter. Congressman Ro Khanna from California acknowledges this failure in his Op-Ed piece in the Boston Globe. “One lesson from Tuesday’s election is clear: Democrats failed to present a compelling economic vision for the working class, and we lost because of it.”

Academic Henry Giroux clarifies this too in Counterpunch, stating that liberals and the Democratic Party, instead of resisting, aligned with Wall Street power brokers like Goldman Sachs. In doing so, they adopted elements of neoliberalism that crushed the working class, intensified the class and racial divide, accelerated staggering levels of inequality, and intensified the long legacy of nativism, all of which fed into the conditions for Trump’s appeal (Giroux, 2024).

Trump campaign had been far more strategic in that they engaged in outreach to the Muslim American community. Trump even visited mosques and met with religious leaders. He had billboards all across Dearborn that were multilingual.

The Gaza Factor

But the fourth point is the Gaza factor, wherein the Biden administration supported a genocidal regime in Israel, bent on ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon too. Harris could have distanced herself from it, claiming that she would deal with it very differently as soon as she took office, but unfortunately, she failed to do so.  Some weeks ago, when asked on ABC’s The View if she would have done anything differently than President Biden, her response was disturbing, “Not a thing comes to mind.” Harris’s reply after a full year of ongoing mass murder and genocide in Gaza, made possible by U.S. military aid, has been seen by many as a prelude to electoral disaster. 

Uncommitted voters continued to press the Harris campaign to shift its Israel policy as the election went on but were routinely ignored. Palestinian American organizer Linda Sarsour, who was in Dearborn on election night excoriated the stance of the party, stating, “Democrats made a calculation that they did not need Arab American, Muslim American, and Palestinian American voters.” In fact, in the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Michigan, Trump won 42% of the vote over Vice President Kamala Harris, who received 36%. Green Party President Jill Stein who had campaigned calling for an arms embargo against Israel received 18% of the vote. 

Sarsour went on to point out how the Trump campaign had been far more strategic in that they engaged in outreach to the Muslim American community. Trump even visited mosques and met with religious leaders. He had billboards all across Dearborn that were multilingual, in language — in Arabic languages, Bangla, in Urdu. They filled in a gap that was left by the Democratic Party (Democracy Now interview, 2024).

Of course, Trump’s words may be quite different than his actual policies, as he has already shown his leanings toward Israel through his track record in his first term. At that time he had recognized Jerusalem as its capital, as well as the recognition of Israel’s annexation of the occupied Golan Heights, and had also instituted the Muslim travel ban to the US.

Nevertheless, the Harris campaign’s ignoring the huge protests by young Americans across the country is reminiscent of the attitude of Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert Humphrey to the mass protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Johnson dropped out of the race, because of his unpopularity over his escalation of the War in Vietnam. Humphrey became the party’s nominee after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, who was running on an anti-war platform, but had continued the unpopular pro-war stance, and then lost to Richard Nixon in 1968. 

All the same, it cannot be denied that the glass ceiling had been breached, not once, but twice, and Harris remains the first woman of color to be nominated as a Presidential candidate. South Asians can feel that they have finally been represented in the political scenario as one of the most prominent immigrant communities of the country. As for women from India, her journey remains a source of inspiration. A newspaper report quotes a local politician from her mother’s ancestral village Arulmozhi Sudhakar who stated that Harris embodies a significant step toward female empowerment.

“From the time when women were not even allowed to step out of their house, to now a woman from our village contesting in the U.S. presidential election — this brings happiness for us,” Sudhakar said. “The coming generations will see her as a role model to succeed in life.”

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Dr. Shoba Sharad Rajgopal received her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2003. She moved to the East Coast to take up a position as the Director of the then Women’s Studies Program at Westfield State University and is currently in charge of the Women & Gender Studies Minor in the Department of Ethnic & Gender Studies, where she teaches courses that focus on gender issues and religious extremism in South Asia. She has worked with colleagues across campus and helped develop an Asian Studies Minor at the university. Dr. Rajgopal traveled widely across Asia and Europe in her previous avatar as a broadcast journalist and reported for the Indian Television networks and CNN International from various international locations.