Each night at this week’s Democratic National Convention, the excitement was palpable long before the crowd reached the gates. You could feel it in the tone of nearby conversations, the waves of laughter coming from all directions, the rhythm of the walk between the carpool drop-off point and the security checkpoint a few blocks away.
Opinion columnist
Granderson Landing Station
LZ Granderson writes about culture, politics, sports, and navigating life in America.
In June, Democrats wanted to defeat Donald Trump.
It’s now August, and Vice President Kamala Harris has changed the face of this election. She has gotten voters to look at each other, reminding us of our collective American values and shared humanity.
In 2020, anger and fear drove many of us to the polls. Harris is tapping into a different source of energy, one embodied in a popular psalm often heard in the civil rights movement: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.”
Democrats were overjoyed this week. And it wasn't about their party, it was about our country. Even heavily armed police officers and usually stoic Secret Service agents couldn't help but smile inside the house that Jordan built.
“America, the path that brought me here these past few weeks, was certainly… unexpected,” Harris said in her acceptance speech Thursday. “But I am no stranger to improbable journeys.”
Beginning with the Tea Party movement, it seemed as if progressives had ceded the idea of “love of country” to the angry mobs seething with rage over the election of President Obama and the passage of the Affordable Care Act: They were the flag-wavers who loudly called themselves patriots.
A change began with the insurrection of January 6, 2021.
Now the Harris campaign is challenging the right's claim about patriotism, love of country and, with The sonic impulse of Beyoncé's anthem — the very concept of freedom.
“This week has been like a dream,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign. “I wonder, ‘Will I wake up at some point and realize this has all been a fantasy?’”
Robinson grew up not far from where the convention was held. She went to Whitney Young High School, the same school as Michelle Obama. The former first lady electrified the crowd on Tuesday. Robinson, the first Black woman to lead the country’s largest LGBTQ+ rights organization, took the stage on Wednesday.
“Chants of ‘USA’ have been heard in the conference rooms,” Robinson told me. “I usually save all my patriotism for the Olympics, but I finally felt like when people were chanting that, it wasn’t a threat to me, it was a story that included me. … That’s only possible because of what’s happening right now, because of what Kamala Harris has done.”
In the early days after President Biden announced he was withdrawing from the presidential election, there was concern about whether America was ready for someone who looked like Harris to be president. Yes, Obama's hope was aspirational. Yes, Hillary Clinton's Left 18 million cracks in the glass ceilingBut Harris as president? For many Americans, this was asking too much.
Imagining Harris as the first Black woman to be president, the first person of South Asian descent to be president, and the first person from an interracial marriage to be president — required voters to let go of what had always been and embrace what could be. The answer to the question of whether America is ready for a president who is not white or male has since been answered with the rallying cry of “We are not going back.”
“It’s very, very powerful,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) told me. “I was elected as the first South Asian to the House of Representatives on the same night that Kamala Harris was the first South Asian to the Senate. When we’re elected to these positions, we’re helping Black and brown women and other people see themselves. Something that maybe didn’t seem possible suddenly seems possible.”
That feeling can change suddenly, but it took decades to change what it was. was possible. Harris accepted the nomination 60 years after Democrats refused to budge. Fannie Lou Hamer, Mississippi civil rights activist —who was pushing for representation for black voters—a delegation seat at the national convention.
Democratic President Lyndon Johnson had just signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. And yet, the following month, his running mate Hubert Humphrey Hamer said“The president has said that he will not allow this illiterate woman to speak on the floor of the Democratic convention.”
This is what Sam Cooke meant when he said “A change is coming.”
It wasn't just about the laws in place. The Civil War ended slavery, but disenfranchisement continued. The change that was needed was also of the heart.
Cooke wrote the iconic song shortly after being denied a room at a whites-only hotel in Louisiana. She published it in 1964, a few months before Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the resulting mistreatment of Hamer; months before Shirley Chisholm, who would become the first black congresswoman, won her first election; months before Harris was born.
If those events seem random and disconnected, Harris's mother, Shyamala Gopalan, would say otherwise.
“Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” The vice president said a famous line last year:Quoting his mother, “You exist in the context of everything you live in and everything that came before you.”
When fear and anger take over, seeing that connective tissue can become impossible. Only through compassion can we see the ties that bind us. Only through compassion can we find the joy that sustains us.
“Hearing Kamala talk about her Indian immigrant mother — which reminds me of my own pioneer mother who moved halfway around the world from her family in search of a different life — is incredibly special,” Versha Sharma, editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, told me. “All our lives, growing up as Americans, we’ve been told that we can be and do anything, but that hasn’t been our reality as women of color. Slowly but surely, things are starting to change.”
That sentiment was shared by many in and around the week's convention.
“This moment has literally been hundreds of years in the making,” said actress Poorna Jagannathan. “Regardless of whether you’re a Democrat, Republican or independent, who we are as Americans is reflected in this nomination and goes beyond politics. This story could only happen in America.”
