The presidential candidate’s vision appeals more to college graduates than to the majority of Black Americans.
If you want an illustration of the extraordinary racial progress America has made over the past 59 years, look to the life of Vice President Kamala Harris, who could now become the second Black president.
Born in Oakland, California—a city deeply divided by race, where the Black Power movement gained ground by explicitly rejecting the cause of racial integration—just months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Harris has achieved great distinction in multiracial milieus, where her cultural literacy and deft code-switching have proved enormous assets. In the mid-1960s, Black elected officials almost exclusively represented Black-majority jurisdictions, and a Black presence in elite institutions was exceedingly rare. By the time Harris first won elected office in 2004, in contrast, she had settled in San Francisco, a city with a small and shrinking Black population, where it was essential for her to build a multiracial political coalition.
Harris’s political “launching pad,” according to the Politico reporter Michael Kruse, was “the tightly knit world of San Francisco high society,” which embraced her as one of its own. Harris came of age amid a rapid expansion of economic opportunity for Black Americans, and especially Black women; her ascent reflects the diversification of the American elite and a growing openness to Black political talent among non-Black voters, both developments that are very much worthy of celebration.
One could argue that Harris’s emergence as the Democratic presidential nominee, like Barack Obama’s before her, is a fulfillment of the civil-rights-era promise of racial integration. Consider, for example, the striking racial diversity of her inner circle, which includes her brother-in-law, Tony West, chief legal officer at Uber; Disney Entertainment Co-chair Dana Walden; and of course her husband, Doug Emhoff, an accomplished entertainment lawyer. Harris’s social world is anything but segregated.
Yet there are rival conceptions of racial progress in American life, and the discourse surrounding Harris’s political rise has overlooked a potential vulnerability for the Democratic coalition in the long run—the cultural and ideological distance separating the progressive Black elite from the working- and middle-class Black majority.
Because Blackness has historically been treated as monolithic, informed by a shared experience of persecution and marginalization, scholars and policy makers have long ignored the Black elite and its central role in America’s racial landscape. As a multiracial daughter of skilled immigrants who is very much at home among upwardly mobile professionals, Harris is best understood as a pioneering member of a Black elite that has been powerfully shaped by rising educational attainment, affluence, immigration, and intermarriage.
From 2002 to 2022, for example, the share of Black adults over 25 with a postgraduate degree increased from 5.3 to 10.6 percent. Over the same period, the share of Black families earning $200,000 or more, adjusted for inflation, rose from 3.9 to 8.4 percent. Those gains haven’t erased inequality; the share of Asian and white adults with a postgraduate degree remains significantly higher than that of Black adults (27.1 percent and 15.7 percent respectively), as does the share of Asian and white families earning $200,000 or more (28.1 percent and 18.2 percent). Nevertheless, these numbers speak to the emergence of a large and flourishing Black upper-middle class.
Rising Black immigration from the Caribbean and Africa, meanwhile, has infused the Black American population with self-selected newcomers who are more likely to be high earners than their native-born counterparts.
