There are moments in political debates that get overblown, spun, or misconstrued. Thursday’s exchange between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden on race won’t be one of them. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, was asked about the recent shooting in his city of a black man, Eric Logan, by a white police officer. Congressman Eric Swalwell and the author Marianne Williamson offered their thoughts. But then Harris’s voice came in and quieted everyone. “As the only black person on this stage,” she said, “I would like to speak on the issue of race.” Harris turned to address Biden, who, last week, at a fund-raiser, waxed nostalgic about the segregationists he once served with in the Senate. “I do not believe you are a racist,” Harris told the former Vice-President. “But I also believe, and it’s personal, and it was actually very hurtful, to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their careers and reputations on the segregation of race in this country.” But Harris wasn’t done. She raised Biden’s opposition to school busing in the nineteen-seventies, and then said that it mattered to her because she knew of a little girl in California who had been bused to school back then. “And that little girl was me,” she said.
Biden tried to respond, invoking his long-ago work as a public defender and his support for civil rights as a senator. “Everything I have done in my career—I ran because of civil rights,” he said. Harris has faced questions about her time as a prosecutor in California, where she fought to uphold certain wrongful convictions, championed a law to prosecute habitually truant children, and legally defended the death penalty despite her opposition to the practice. But, on Thursday, she clarified the stakes of discussing race on the debate stage in the race for the Democratic nomination in 2020. “It cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats,” she said.
