CNN: Kamala's laugh evokes Black Joy

But isn't there a simpler explanation for why Kamala is so awkward and uncool despite being black?

This press coverage trope of Kamala running for President on “joy” is tied into the term “black joy,” which became fashionable during the Black Lives Matter era according to Google’s Ngram.

(At the same time, the fairly similar “black girl magic” also caught on with authors.)

For example, from CNN:

Kamala Harris is tapping into the Black Joy movement

Analysis by John Blake, CNN

Updated 7:30 AM EDT, Sun August 25, 2024

It’s been called “Kamalamania,” “Kamalmentum,” and “Kamelot.” …

In the five weeks since Kamala Harris upended the 2024 presidential race, the commentariat has used all kinds of phrases to describe Democrats’ euphoria about her sudden White House run.

But there is another electoral force propelling Harris’ candidacy that has barely been noticed: “Black Joy.”

Harris isn’t just “campaigning on joy,” as so many commentators have recently noted. She is also tapping into something called the “Black Joy” movement. Led by Black artists, authors, activists and others, the movement declares that Black people’s humanity will not be defined by trauma or oppression but by something else:

“A joy that no White man can steal.”

That’s how the author Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts describes the movement’s essence in her book, “Black Joy.”

Black Joy is hard to define but easy to see and feel. …

Still, Harris is doing more than surfing the Black joy wave. She’s turned some of its core beliefs into a political strategy in at least two ways:

She uses laughter to show that she is free

Can an election turn on how one presidential candidate laughs and the other one doesn’t? That’s one of the quirks that commentators have noticed about this election: Harris laughs a lot, while Trump laughs not so much, if at all.

One CNN analyst noted that Harris will “laugh at herself in the midst of a speech, or in the midst of a press conference or during a ‘60 Minutes’ interview — otherwise serious moments when another politician might try to keep a straight face throughout.”

But there is a racial history behind Harris’ laughter that’s easy to miss.

… To survive, many Black people played along by flashing a submissive, “just-happy-to-be-here, boss” laughter around White people.

Yet other Black people chose to laugh when and how they wanted — even if White folks didn’t like it. …

Consider this quote by a Black man born into slavery as described in the book, “Black Joy.”

“Others have said I laugh loudly and often. This too is true,” the man says. “I’ve found that my joy is the most irritating to those who are righteously indignant at my audacity to walk around like I’m free.”

This is the kind of laughter that Harris evokes. Her laugh signals to Black supporters and White allies that she is free to do what she wants. It’s loud, raucous, and maybe a little strange, but it doesn’t appear to be curated for White sensibilities.

But is Kamala’s awkward laugh curated for black sensibilities either?

Has any black ever said, “Wow, Kamala’s got a really cool black laugh! She’s the female Samuel L. Jackson!”

Instead, she seems kind of nervous much of the time, like suddenly the whole world is going to realize she’s just some sorority girl who is in over her head with this whole President thing, and so she laughs to cover up her pangs of terror and to give her time to try to think of something to get her out of the rhetorical dead end she’s wandered into. (Similarly, she will repeat a phrase over and over while hoping to come up with something, anything, to say.)

“I have my mother’s laugh,” Harris said in one recent interview.

Uh … okay … but, you know, her mother is the Indian parent, not the black parent.

And I grew up around a bunch of women in particular, who laughed from the belly. … They would sit around the kitchen and drinking their coffee, telling big stories with big laughs.”

Indian women, not black women.

It’s striking how nobody ever suggests that Kamala’s uncoolness might be related to her being half Indian and mostly raised in an Indian household. After all, blacks and South Asians tend to be at the opposite ends of the coolness scale. Everybody seems to obsess over her being about one-quarter black, but few can even remember that she’s considerably more South Asian than she is black, which may explain a lot about her Apu Nahasapeemapetilon-like dorkiness.

It’s like how few could remember that Obama was half by nature and almost all by nurture a preppy WASP from the kind of academic-oriented WASP families that ran the Ivy League until not too long ago. His grandfather was kind of a lout, but grandpa’s big brother, Dr. Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham, was a fine representative of the cultivated old time WASP. And Obama’s grandmother’s sister was a college professor who was in a Boston Marriage with another lady professor straight out of a Henry James novel.