Reflections: The Shared Anxiety Women of Color See in Kamala Harris’s Presidential Run

Ever since news broke that Kamala Harris would launch a campaign for the U.S. presidency — the nation’s highest political office — I have been bracing for what is to come. I have worked to steady my nerves for the barrage of aggressive attacks that accompany any modern political campaign, regardless of party, and that have only grown more vicious in recent years.

But what I have been feeling runs far deeper than what one therapist terms “election stress disorder.” It is a specific anxiety rooted in my identity as a woman of color, living in a country that still has not learned to nurture our ambition or celebrate our success.

“For women of color, self-doubt and the feeling that we do not belong in corporate workplaces can be even more pronounced — not because women of color (a broad, imprecise categorization) have an innate deficiency, but because the intersection of our race and gender often places us in a precarious position at work,” wrote Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey in Harvard Business Review in 2021. “Many of us across the world are implicitly, if not explicitly, told we don’t belong in white- and male-dominated workplaces.”

Harris’s intensely public campaign, which functions as a high-stakes national job interview, lays bare the unique barriers many women of color navigate in their own workplaces every day. As the presidential election comes to dominate every corner of American public life, I cannot stop thinking about the baseless insults repeatedly thrown at Vice President Harris:

“She’s unqualified for the job.”

“She can’t handle the work.”

“She does not deserve this role.”

“Her professional success only came from special handouts.”

“She’s just the ‘DEI candidate.’”

Every one of these claims is entirely unfounded, and to me, they are clearly rooted in overlapping racial and gender bias. Like millions of other women of color, these constant attacks have brought my own experiences of having my hard work unjustly called into question rushing back to me. The baseless critiques of Harris’s qualifications only amplify the small, persistent voice in the back of my mind that demands I constantly prove I deserve my seat at the table.

Back in 2012, I moved to Chicago for a new job. From my first day, I did not feel welcomed, and I worried constantly that I would struggle to fit in or build genuine connections with my new team. Before my first week even ended, a colleague asked me if I personally knew the executive director who had hired me. The unspoken subtext was clear: they were questioning how I could have earned that role on my own merit, without some kind of insider connection to land me the position.