Racist and sexist takes on Kamala Harris are in full swing. She’ll flip it.

President Joe Biden announced on social media Sunday he would not seek reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement. Barely two days later, she had secured enough Democratic Party delegates to become the presumptive nominee.

Amid this whirlwind, someone fired the starter pistol on the first wave of racism and sexism directed at Harris, who would be the first Black woman president and is also of Indian heritage. I can envision David Duke being the one chosen to kick off the Hate-Stakes: The Louisiana-based former KKK grand wizard and former Republican state legislator was seen last month slumming around in Detroit with people of his ilk outside a conservative political convention.

Right-wing media couldn’t wait. This was their "Kamala moment," too.

Republicans think Kamala Harris will be easy to beat. They’re wrong

Fox News host Jesse Waters asked, “Suddenly she’s the next messiah?” and said Harris was only in this position because of a “DEI” deal that Biden cut in the 2020 Democratic Party primary.

The DEI insult refers to diversity, equity and inclusion policies, the right’s new boogeyman, replacing for now Critical Race Theory, "woke" and all the rest. (Cheat sheet: In the mouths of these folks, all of these catchy words are stand-ins for the word “Black” — or worse.)

Last week, washed-up newsreader and ex-Fox alum Megyn Kelly decided her day would be fulfilled by passing along on X, formerly Twitter, the slur that Harris slept her way to the top. It is a charge often thrown at powerful women.

Meanwhile, video recently surfaced from 2021 that shows JD Vance, who is Republican nominee Donald Trump’s pick for vice president, claiming the Democratic Party was propped up by “childless cat ladies” and people like Harris who do not have children.

Harris is stepmom to husband Douglas Emhoff’s two children and Vance’s comments are painful for many women and families who wanted kids and couldn’t have them or just don’t want to be judged for their life choices. The hurtful words also erase the important role of stepparents and guardians who are not biological parents to their children, which encompasses millions of women AND men.

Rather than walking the comments back, which all political logic would suggest, Vance instead doubled down on them this week. He was perhaps aping his boss, Trump, who never apologizes for anything.

GOP House members indulge in anti-Harris hate

Some U.S. House Republicans have not been covering themselves in glory, either, unless we’re talking rebel glory — and that ain’t the good kind.

Kamala Harris rallied in Fayetteville. I was there. Days later, the election changed

Rep. Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, slurred Harris as a “DEI” hire. Another Tennessee congressman, Andy Ogles, actually filed articles of impeachment against the vice president.

On what grounds?

This goober Ogles wants to take a potshot at the Black woman. Those are the grounds.

Meanwhile, one of the nastier digs at Harris came from a woman, which will either surprise you or not surprise you in the least.

Here’s what North Carolina needs to know ahead of the November election

Rep. Harriet Hageman, a Wyoming Republican, repeated the DEI slur and said the vice president is “intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel.”

That sweet, sweet racism got to feeling so good to some House members that party leaders had to tell them to cool it in a closed-door meeting. How embarrassing for the party, that grown adults need to be told such things.

They should have learned this at their parents’ knees. But what is too often clear is that they instead learned lessons on intolerance from their folks. Maybe I got their folks all wrong.

In the 2024 election, racism is bad politics

Let’s leave aside the right and wrong of it, the whole post-Reconstruction vibes of it.

Racism in 2024 is just bad politics.

When they call Harris a DEI pick, an easy comeback for Democrats and Harris supporters presents itself: They just run down the vice president’s resume. So we get to hear all about how she was the San Francisco district attorney; was attorney general in the country’s most populous state and then U.S. senator there; and finally vice president of the United States. It's a free campaign ad.

Harris, former prosecutor, said she knows Trump's type

Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out what it is that her haters believe Harris cannot do.

As a former top prosecutor, much of her career has been examining evidence and meticulously building a case or supervising people who do the same.

I thought about this earlier in the week when Harris took a few jabs at Trump, convicted in May of 34 felony counts in an elections fraud case. You'll recall a central feature in that episode was a hush money payment that Trump — whose wife, Melania had recently given birth — paid to hide a tryst with pornographic actress Stormy Daniels.

In widely broadcast remarks Tuesday, Harris reminded her people at a staff meeting about her courtroom experience.

"In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds," she said. "Predators who abuse women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump's type.”

Hee-hee. I got a chuckle out of that. But what can you say? It's all true.

Harris has been in the room where it happens

Beyond that, Harris has met a number of world leaders and been in the room where it happens. She sat down with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday and sharpened U.S. calls for a ceasefire in the Gaza war.

Harris "would bring greater foreign policy experience than most new US presidents," according to Chatham House, a global affairs think tank and conference center. She served as lead of the U.S. delegation at the important 2022 Munich Security Conference. She is in lock-step with Biden on Ukraine policy, which is continued American support for that country's fight against invasion by Vladimir Putin's Russia.

If you ask me who I trust to come out of a meeting with a world leader with the best understanding of what was said, I'd say Harris, who is 59, over Trump. It is not just that the former president, who is 78, goes on rants during his rally speeches about his morbid fear of sharks or apparent high regard for fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter.

It's that he's a congenital liar, too. So, nothing he said about the meeting afterward could be trusted.

I am getting that old Obama feeling

I gotta tell you, I am getting that ol’ Barack Obama feeling from 2008 when it comes to Harris, in both good and bad ways. The good: The sense that Americans are ready to trust taking a chance on a new kind of candidate and a more inclusive society.

The bad: the DEI comments and other crap we’ve seen, including the rebirth of the "birtherism" attack that Trump and others spewed in the 2012 election. Sadly, we are probably just beginning, especially if the race remains as closely contested as everyone expects.

I would recommend you purchase a good pair of boots, and I would go for waders, because we are going to hear all sorts of muck and mess between now and November. We will see levels of racism, sexism and assorted ickiness against Harris that we have not seen before — and that's just in July.

I suspect she can handle it though, and will emerge stronger.

Opinion Editor Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559. 

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Harris hate reminds me of Obama. Racism and sexism are in full swing