Why Trump calling Harris "lazy" is brilliant... and terrible
Last week, presidential candidate Donald Trump said of presidential candidate Kamala Harris, "She's lazy. She's lazy as hell."
It’s not often that the word “lazy” makes national news. Normally I’m not one to write newsletters on the latest news headline, but since I literally wrote the book on this one, I had to speak up.
Jabs between candidates about each other’s campaign strategies are nothing new. Lately Democratic candidates have been mocking Trump’s choice to play Ave Maria and an eclectic mix of dance music at a Town Hall. Everybody wants to paint their opponent as aimless and deranged.
But this “lazy” jab cuts deeper. Here’s why it is both brilliantly effective and terribly wrong.
It’s brilliant because with one word, Trump has summoned a whole narrative that fights against Harris. The word “lazy,” when applied to a person of African American descent, taps into a centuries-old stereotype that will resonate with many Americans at a level so subtle that few will consciously recognize what’s happening.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Europeans searched for ways to justify killing, plundering, and setting up colonies around the world, they came upon one very effective technique: instill the idea that human beings come in distinct and hierarchically ranked “races.” Scientists jumped on board, often without realizing how their own political biases led them to terribly skewed results. The Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, for example, thought he could expand his influential work sorting living beings into species, genera, and phyla, to also sort humans into a taxonomy of races. In 1758 he wrote that people of the “Africanus” race could be identified as “crafty, sly, lazy, cunning, lustful, careless; anoints himself with grease; and governed by caprice.” See it there? Lazy.
Once European people believed that African people were inherently lazy, it wasn’t hard to believe that enslavement was benevolent work—by forcing African people into back-breaking labor, Europeans could believe themselves to be training poor indigent Black people to have a better work ethic.
That line of thinking has not gone away. We can find examples ever since of unemployment and poverty getting blamed on the laziness of racial groups. These explanations divert attention away from sticky structural problems like segregation, discrimination, and under resourced schools. Clearly, this is harmful to Black people. There’s a particularly troubling double consciousness that comes of hearing yourself called lazy while simultaneously struggling to survive amidst unjust systems that demand anything but laziness.
But the laziness stereotype also does subtle damage to other ethnic groups, including the Latino and Latina voters who were perhaps not coincidentally the audience Trump addressed with his lazy comment. Racism doesn’t just single out one racial group at a time with isolated stereotypes. It pits one racial group against each other in a hierarchy from “model minorities” on down. In the United States, White people have often loved to praise Latino and Latina people as “models” for their “hard work ethic.” But it’s backhanded praise when it works as a subtle excuse for low wages and menial tasks. It also fosters unnecessary animosity between Black and Latino people, pitting these groups against each other in a deadly competition for who will be the most desperate to survive amidst unfair systems.
For the record, Harris spent the so-called “lazy” day in D. C. meetings and in a recording studio after a 14-day traveling stretch. But when Trump called Harris “lazy,” he was not just saying she took a day off from travel. He tapped into a deeply-rooted narrative that has proven effective in turning public opinion against Black people. He was communicating to Latino and Latina voters, “See, I’m on your side—you’re the hard working ones and she’s one of those other people who you can’t trust.” He was saying to White voters, “See, everything you and your ancestors have feared about Black people is true—she’s ready to live off government handouts and the wealth you’ve rightfully earned by your own hard work.”
Can you see this is a problem?
Folks, there are many reasons to vote and many ways to choose your candidate, but let’s not let racial bigotry in political rhetoric go unchecked.
To read more about why we need to stop calling people lazy, check out my earlier post that includes a podcast interview.