Did the 'Kamala Is a Cop' meme help tank Kamala Harris's campaign?
at reform. The meme merely took publicly accessible information and translated it into an easily disseminated catchphrase. “You voting for Kamala? No way, she’s a cop.” For a generation that came of digital age watching movements grow in real-time around police accountability, that’s enough to leave them wondering who their other options are.
Regardless of its origin, the popularity of the meme speaks to a cynicism that some young voters have regarding Senator Harris’s record: Someone who talks about reforming unjust systems but is reluctant to acknowledge their own complicity to those systems. I asked the campaign if Harris had a plan to gain trust from young voters, like the Spelman student quoted in theThis was the response:
The memes and most importantly, their origin, at best are a manipulation of facts and at worst lies and designed to disuade voters or likely voter and stoke hate and skepticism based on race. If Tulsi Gabbards debate moment was any indication the claims she threw at my boss and her record were straight from those memes and immediately following were proven false.
In this, the Harris camp conflated several things at once. Memes, by their very nature, are prone to facetiousness. And while variations of the “Kamala Is a Cop” meme are no exception, the heart of the meme is the same: Harris has a troubling record on criminal justice reform, which plays awkwardly against her campaign’s insistence on avoiding the grittier discussions of her work history.
Is a photo of Kamala Harris happily greeting a sea of young black school children with the pithy caption, “Kamala Harris getting ready to fill up another prison” necessarily “based in truth”? Well, that depends on who you ask. Ask the black mothers of the Bay Area who were disproportionately threatened by Harris’s anti-truancy proposals. Ask the disproportionately black and brown families of those punished under California’s draconian three-strikes law .
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