Misogynoir in Today’s America: Exploring the History of the Racist, Sexist Attacks on Kamala Harris

In late September, a group of Kamala Harris supporters was assaulted in York, Pennsylvania, by an assailant shouting “n— supporter.” The incident occurred after a sustained campaign of racist vitriol against Vice President Harris during the 2024 election cycle, perhaps displayed most blatantly in July when former President Trump told an audience of Black journalists in Chicago that he had not known about Harris’s mixed-race background “until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black.” 

The particular combination of sexist rhetoric with racist tropes has a long history in the American story. Perhaps most notably, the “misogynoir” invectives launched at Harris are reminiscent of the so-called “Jezebel” stereotypes, which portray Black women as sexually manipulative and disobedient. The history of this term stretches back to slavery, when it was frequently used to justify the rape of enslaved Africans. The insinuations aim to dehumanize Harris—to rob the vice president of her mind and professional credentials and distill her power down to something merely physical. One Christian nationalist pastor for instance defined Harris as the “personification of intimidation, seduction, domination and manipulation.” 

For years, pro-Trump vendors have peddled paraphernalia declaring, “Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go.” A hawker in Tucson, for example, recently said a “Hoe” t-shirt was his bestseller. But as the election approaches its critical stage, the sexualization of the Democratic candidate has reached a deafening roar. For instance, during the much-discussed Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, one speaker insisted that “Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.” Some Christian nationalist leaders have recently warned followers that Harris is possessed by a “Jezebel spirit,” a framing that scholar Matthew Taylor suggests might be intended to inspire a violent response. In July, Trump declared that Harris would be no match for world leaders, telling Fox News, “She’ll be so easy for them. She’ll be like a play toy.”  

But the tropes may be more than merely slander. In the same way the Jezebel caricature gave white men a pass on rape or other abuse, it also smoothly gave them a pass on violence. For instance, the Birth of a Nation movie featured a Jezebel character who lusted after one of the movie’s flawed abolitionist characters. The 1915 movie glorified the night riders of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and, in fact, inspired the group’s resurgence in a postwar America rife with additional anti-immigrant and antisemitic undertones. The racist credentials of the group remained strong enough, ironically, that the KKK actually supported voting rights for white women. More white votes, they supposed, would drown out Black enfranchisement. 

The misogynoir characterizing the final days of the 2024 campaign is, in fact, one of the key channels through which the Republican party and its standard-bearers connect with the violent fringes of their movement. Much as it accompanied racist violence in prior eras, racism against women of color stands out in modern violent extremist canon. Far-right terrorist manifestos, whether the attacks they accompany targeted women or not, are often soaked in misogynist discourse. The gunman who murdered ten African Americans at a Tops Friendly Market in May 2022, for instance, declared that “Black women are more than twice as likely as white women to abuse their husbands.” And while praising the “Supreme Gentleman” and incel killer Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the white supremacist August 2023 Jacksonville Dollar General shooting wrote, “I don’t think women should be denied the right to vote. I just think they should be denied the right to vote on important things that require informed decision making.” 

The recently released 2023 FBI hate crimes statistics revealed that roughly a third of hate crime victims in the United States in the past five years are African American. The question, then, may be less whether misogynoir leaves Black women particularly targeted by the far right in its various forms, and instead what the enduring presence of this virulent form of racist misogyny says about our country, its history, and its values. Next week, Americans across the nation will head to their local polling place to cast their votes for their preferred choice between two candidates who have made their case to the American people. Unfortunately, the toxic cocktail of racism and sexism that has attempted to fell Kamala Harris will surely play a role in the choice made by many voters. 

And should Harris win, the groundwork will already have been laid for a reaction of another sort. As M.J.C. Warren warns in The Conversation, “we can’t forget that confronting Jezebel is violent – in the Bible confronting Jezebel means her death or her rape. These veiled threats should not be taken lightly.”