What makes me crazy about the “Harris might not be loyal to Biden because she criticized him at the debate” take is that she wasn’t *supposed* to be loyal to him at that point. She was his opponent. This hardly precludes the possibility of loyalty if he earns it by making her VP.
They’re criticizing her for not being loyal to a man for whom she didn’t work, who hadn’t earned her specific loyalty. Why the hell should she have been “loyal” to him, even if she weren’t fighting him in a primary?
That’s why it strikes so many of us as sexist, as I think. Because it faults her for failing to show fealty to a senior man who had done nothing at that point to earn it.
And implicitly racist, too, of course. It’s clearly both at once. I tweeted about this last week, about criticisms of her “ambition” being part of a racist & sexist discourse about “uppity” black women not knowing their place. Loyalty thing is part and parcel of same attitude.
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