Harris has an answer for the ‘DEI’ slur. But she has to give it.

Harris’s main qualification, at that point, was that she was easily the safest choice. Absent her identity, it’s hard to imagine she would have been anywhere near Biden’s top choice.

But you know what? You could say the same for almost every vice-presidential pick in recent memory. Would JD Vance be on Donald Trump’s ticket if he weren’t a rural White guy from Ohio? Was Sarah Palin chosen for her vast policy experience? Would Barack Obama have chosen Biden if he hadn’t felt he needed a validator for White working-class voters?

To say that Harris is where she is largely because of her identity is to say she is the vice president of the United States. To say that makes her somehow different from everybody else who gets the job is just plain ignorant.

And yet it took about 10 minutes after Harris became her party’s presumptive nominee for Republicans to label her a “DEI” vice president who has the job only because of “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts regarding her race and gender.

These attacks seem to come from a place of flat-out racism. Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.) described Harris as “intellectually, just really kind of bottom of the barrel” — which, coming from someone who once argued that the aim of the Endangered Species Act was to replace people with lions and cheetahs, might be something of a projection.

But they also reflect a broader vulnerability among more enlightened voters whom Harris needs to win — one that Democrats and their new nominee would be wise not to ignore.

Since 2020, as I’ve written before, a segment of the left has been advocating what amounts to cultural revolution in schools and workplaces. What began as “wokeness” — a term that’s now too contested to be useful — morphed into a movement that feels to a lot of White voters like a never-ending exercise in public shaming and racial retribution.

At its intellectual core, this movement rejects one of the main tenets of traditional liberalism when it comes to race: that the point of programs like affirmative action was to guarantee equal opportunity, rather than equal outcomes. This is what equity, rather than equality, is really about: the contention that treating everyone equally, as Democrats promised to do for a half-century, isn’t nearly enough to fix the systemic injustices in the society.

As president, Biden has done nothing to distance himself from this revolution in his party. But then, he didn’t have to. Biden, after all, spent 50 years in public life cementing a reputation as a social moderate and champion of the White working class. Whatever a bunch of swing-state voters think of “DEI” in the Democratic ranks, no one really imagines that Biden sits around hatching plans to overturn the social order.

But with Biden out of the picture in November, Democrats are bound to face greater peril with independent White voters. Almost anyone who stepped in to replace him, regardless of race or gender, was going to be more vulnerable on this question of whether Democrats now support a more radical social agenda than the one the party espoused for most of the past half-century.

That it’s Harris, however, makes the issue more complicated. For one thing, voters really don’t know what she believes about anything, other than on the issues on which Democrats all agree. That’s the privilege of being a vice president: You get to cheerlead without taking any stands of your own.

And, of course, because Harris is a Black woman, a lot of White voters will probably assume she harbors racial resentments. Obama successfully navigated similar questions, even after video emerged of the politically disastrous rhetoric of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright; Obama’s speech on race, delivered during the 2008 campaign, will go down as one of the most effective political speeches in modern history. But this is a very different moment, and Harris isn’t as gifted a communicator.

I’m guessing that Harris — who, as linguist John McWhorter pointed out in the New York Times, has a more racially complicated lineage than any one label can accurately convey — is, like Obama, more of a traditional Democrat on these questions than some of her supporters. Her running mate, when she finally chooses one, might help reassure moderate White voters. So might the fact that she’s married to a White man; if I were her strategist, I’d put Doug Emhoff on every TV show I could find, from now until Election Day. But that’s probably not enough.

I’m not suggesting Harris needs her own version of the “Sister Souljah moment” — a quadrennial cliché stemming from Bill Clinton’s decision, in 1992, to criticize a Black rapper in an effort to win over the family-values crowd. Calling out your allies as a bit of political theater doesn’t really work anymore, as Harris learned firsthand after she attacked then-candidate Joe Biden in a primary debate ahead of the 2020 election for opposing integration by school busing in the 1970s.

What Harris can do, however, is tell her own personal story: of a girl born to two immigrant academic parents (one Indian and one Jamaican), a child of divorce raised with the help of a strong African American community, who willed herself to a higher level in U.S. government than any woman in history. It’s the story she only started to tell during that debate with Biden — not of victimization or futility in the face of prejudice but of the promise of American opportunity, aided by activist government. Simply by recounting her own improbable journey, Harris can embody the American story that most voters still want to believe.

That’s not the pessimistic story some on the left want to hear right now. But it’s hard to see how Harris wins over skeptical White voters without clearly signaling that she doesn’t support the idea that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” as author Ibram X. Kendi, one of the intellectual leaders of the new social leftism, has argued.

And it’s hard to see how she comes out on the right end of what is now a statistical tie with Trump if she doesn’t champion the liberal idea of equal opportunity for everyone, rather than abandoning that project altogether.