For Women of Color, a Barrage of Racist Slurs From the Far Right

By Jaden Satenstein, June 30, 2022

“As dumb as a hammer” (about Joy Reid)

“An imbecile” (about Kamala Harris)

“America’s dumbest bartender” (about AOC)

“Suffers from hot chick syndrome” (about Kamala Harris)

“A pile of garbage” (about Joy Reid)

These are just a few of the countless degrading terms that right-wing news outlets have used to describe women of color in politics and media this year alone, according to an informal survey by The Righting. To say that this coverage of high-profile figures like Vice President Kamala Harris, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and MSNBC anchor Joy Reid is overwhelmingly racist seems obvious and redundant. Still, to ignore the enormity of the issue simply because it is so blatant only normalizes this pattern.

A 2020 report by TIME’S UP, a non-profit that supports victims of sexual harassment, found that a quarter of news pieces covering President Biden’s VP pick announcement featured racist and sexist language. By comparing this language with the announcements of former vice presidential candidates Mike Pence and Tim Kaine in 2016, the report also revealed that adjectives used by news outlets to describe Harris skewed far more negative than those used in reference to both Pence and Kaine.

This media trend aligned with former President Donald Trump’s own language, as the report noted that Trump’s attacks on Harris were far harsher than his attacks on Kaine, often relying on racist and sexist tropes like the “angry Black woman.” Trump’s treatment of Harris is no anomaly, as his many attacks on women of color are well-documented.

Echoes of Birtherism

This year, as another Black woman became the subject of mass media coverage, racist attacks once again made headlines. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson received her bachelor’s degree and Juris Doctor from Harvard University. She served as a Supreme Court clerk, district judge, and circuit judge for the US Courts of Appeals, which are the highest federal courts, just below the Supreme Court. Still, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who hosts the second-highest rated cable news show in the country, questioned her qualifications and demanded she further prove her credibility by sharing her LSAT scores. The attack was reminiscent of the racist birtherism claims Trump propagated about former President Barack Obama more than a decade earlier.

A Broader Racist Agenda

Attacks on female political figures of color are not simply tools for achieving partisan goals. As the constant vitriol directed toward Black female athletes and celebrities plainly shows, this racist rhetoric is about much more than politics.

Conservative radio host and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk called Simone Biles a “selfish sociopath” and a “shame to our country” after she pulled out of the US Women’s Gymnastics team final at the Tokyo Summer Olympics last year.

A Russian court extended the detainment of WNBA Player Brittney Griner in June, four months after her February arrest in Moscow for allegedly carrying vape cartridges containing hash oil in her luggage. Although the US Department of State insists that Griner was “wrongfully detained,” The Blue State Conservative described Griner as an “ungrateful America-hating basketball player” who shows “hatred and disrespect for her homeland.”

The success of women of color across all fields is a direct threat to the white supremacist ideals at the foundation of much right-wing media. While these attacks may seem absurd and juvenile, they are part of a calculated effort to tear down powerful women of color and uphold the systems designed to keep them there. To accept them as offensive but inevitable only helps to perpetuate them and the pain they cause.

The Battle Continues

While Trump may be the embodiment of the violent bigotry of the far-right, it clearly does not begin and end with him. He didn’t create the hateful language we see in the media. As he has embraced it, however, he’s made it impossible for white audiences to ignore the kind of prejudice and hate that women of color have to live with every day.  

Given Trump’s role in the proliferation of this demeaning coverage, many liberals breathed a sigh of relief when he lost the 2020 election. Democrats framed the race as a way to defeat all that Trump stood for. Biden called it a “battle for the soul of our nation” while standing on the battlefields of Gettysburg. We were at war, and Trump lost. Sadly, as this year’s barrage of slurs confirms, the battle is far from over.

Jaden Satenstein (@jadensat) is a writer and producer currently based in St. Louis, MO. She has worked for WNYC, FRONTLINE PBS, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Straus News Manhattan.

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