Vice President Kamala Harris has a history of fighting for people who tend to be threatened by environmental dangers: the impoverished and minorities.
But her positions have drawn inflammatory and misleading attacks from Republicans who portray her as advocating for racial preferences in public policy that could be unfair to white Americans. The attacks promise to assume a larger role in the presidential race as Harris emphasizes climate change programs created by the Biden administration to counteract discriminatory policies that led to higher levels of pollution in low-income and minority communities.
On Monday, during Harris’ first full day of campaigning for president, a Republican congressman from Tennessee called Harris “our DEI vice president,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion. Harris, a child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, is the first major party presidential candidate who is Black and South Asian.
Rep. Tim Burchett later said, incorrectly, that President Joe Biden had vowed during the 2020 campaign “to hire a Black female for vice president.” Biden promised to select a woman as his running mate but said nothing about race. Burchett’s comments raised concern among environmental justice advocates for their discriminatory overtones, and led Republican leaders in the House to warn their party against commenting on Harris’ race and gender.
At a campaign rally Monday, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the running mate of former President Donald Trump, appeared to anticipate the role that race could play in the campaign and mocked Democrats for saying “it’s racist to do anything.”
“I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today. I’m sure they’re going to call that racist, too,” Vance told a cheering crowd.
Harris has been a powerful force behind the Biden administration’s focus on equity, targeting what it calls “disadvantaged communities” for environmental help and climate protection.
Policies and climate programs to help low-income and minority populations were drawn in part from legislation such as the Climate Equity Act of 2020, which Harris introduced as a senator from California, and from a major spending plan she released while running for president in 2019.
“She championed environmental justice legislation that became central to our historic Inflation Reduction Act,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said Wednesday at a White House event, referring to Harris’ bills and the Biden administration’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act.
Robert Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University who helped launch the environmental justice movement in the early 1980s, said Harris “has supported us in breaking down barriers and getting into those rooms where decisions are being made.”
A section of the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law that gives school districts $5 billion to buy low-emitting buses features language taken verbatim from Harris’ Clean School Bus Act of 2019.
“She has played an enormous role” developing and publicizing the administration’s environmental justice programs, said David Kieve, president of Environmental Defense Fund Action and a former official at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “She has forged deep personal relationships with specific environmental justice leaders.”
Harris herself said in December: “I have fought my entire career to address these inequities and advance environmental justice, including here in the White House.”
Although lawmakers and governors of both parties have welcomed federal money from measures such as the Inflation Reduction Act, some have blasted Harris’ remarks about equity — and at times misconstrued them.
In October 2022, just after Hurricane Ian hit Florida, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) assailed Harris for her comments about “giving resources based on equity.”
“Harris said yesterday that … if you have a different skin color, you’re going to get relief faster,” Scott said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
When host Margaret Brennan noted that Harris had not made such a statement, Scott replied, “That’s exactly what she meant.”
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose northern Georgia district saw some damage from Ian, said in a Twitter postthat was “liked” 22,000 times: “@KamalaHarris hurricanes do not target people based on the color of their skin. Hurricanes do not discriminate.
“And neither should the federal government giving aid to people suffering from the devastation of Hurricane Ian,” Greene continued. “Is your husband’s life worth less bc he’s white?”
Harris had been responding to a question about the federal response to Ian and to disaster relief more broadly.
“We have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also need to fight for equity; understanding that not everyone starts out at the same place,” Harris said. “And if we want people to be in an equal place, sometimes we have to take into account those disparities and do that work.”
‘Born a target’
In September 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency implemented policies aimed at reducing barriers faced by low-income people and minorities when applying for disaster aid. FEMA said it has given out hundreds of millions of dollars in aid by making it easier for survivors to prove their eligibility for the money.
Despite some Republicans’ assertions about hurricane aid being steered to people of color, a large portion of FEMA money for Florida residents was given to white communities.
An analysis by POLITICO’s E&E News shows that $750 million of the $1.1 billion provided by FEMA after Ian went to residents in ZIP codes where the population is at least 70 percent white and not Hispanic.
Florida’s overall population is 52 percent white.
“I firmly believe that these attacks are just because she’s a Black woman,” said Maria Lopez-Nuñez, deputy director of the Ironbound Community Corp., a New Jersey environmental organization.
“She has plenty of experience. She’s been an attorney general and then a senator and then a vice president. I don’t know what other type of resume you should have to be president of the United States,” added Lopez-Nuñez, a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
The attacks on Harris over climate equity fit a pattern for Black women, said Chauncia Willis, CEO of the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management.
“Once we achieve those positions of leadership, everything about us is questioned, from our hair to our ability to our capacity for funding people and projects,” said Willis, a former emergency management coordinator for Tampa, Florida.
“Kamala Harris should expect to be attacked for it,” Willis said of the vice president’s push for climate equity. “She was born a target for Republicans. Everything that she embodies is the antithesis of what the Rick Scotts of the world would like to see.”
Scott’s communications director, McKinley Lewis, said in an email: “Senator Scott thinks FEMA should respond to help everyone who needs help in disasters. He is proud to make sure the federal government shows up in emergencies. You should ask VP Harris why she thinks FEMA should re-evaluate how they respond to Americans in need.”
Greene’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
When Harris joined the Senate in 2017, her legislative advocacy for Black Americans came mostly through commemorative resolutions honoring the Senate Black Legislative Staff Caucus and the Buffalo Soldiers, the famous 19th-century all-Black Army regiments.
The Senate did not approve Harris’ resolutions to recognize Black Maternal Health Week and to celebrate nine historically Black colleges and universities — including her alma mater, Howard University — entering their 150th year.
Harris strongly advocated for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria demolished the U.S. territory in 2017. In 2019 and 2020, she became a leader in the Senate on environmental justice by sponsoring the Environmental Justice for All Act and an early co-sponsor of the Green New Deal.
Harris has interacted “the most” with the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, said Lopez-Nuñez, the council member. “Environmental justice has the potential to strengthen under her.”
But it also could falter under political and intellectual attacks.
Two days before the 2020 election, Harris posted a 50-second animated video on Twitter under the headline, “There’s a big difference between equality and equity.”
A female narrator explains the two terms and says at the end, “Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.”
The libertarian Cato Institute, quoting the influential 20th-century academic Friedrich Hayek, said in a blog post that Harris was trying to “equalize opportunity,” which the think tank called “totalitarian.”
“It is empirically untrue that when given equity in terms of opportunities, people end up in the same place,” Cato wrote.
Conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan said the video advocated “equality of outcomes enforced by the government. They used to call that communism.”
