Nancy Mace Jumps Jim Crow Over Kamala Harris’s Name

Someone with no self-respect can’t respect others.

Rep. Nancy Mace from South Carolina called two adult Black men “boys.” Michael Eric Dyson is a 65-year-old minister, professor, and radio host. Former Bill Clinton White House aide Keith Boykin turns 59 at the end of the month. Mace is a 46-year-old Congress member from South Carolina, but she apparently believes Black people have no rights that she’s bound to respect. It’s the story of America.

This particular chapter began last week on CNN when Mace made a show of mispronouncing Vice President Kamala Harris’s first name. It’s not an especially difficult name to pronounce, which is probably why Mace said “Kamala” correctly the first time before correcting herself.

“You had it right! You almost got it!” Boykin said. Mace responded that she’d “say Kamala’s name any way that I want to.” She’s behaving like Endora (Agnes Moorhead) on Bewitched, who knows that her son-in-law’s name is Darrin but demonstrates her contempt by repeatedly calling him the wrong name (“Durwood” was my favorite).

Mispronouncing European names and words is usually presented as evidence that someone is poorly educated and unworldly: On the 1980s sitcom Mr. Belvedere, ditzy teen Angela (Michele Matheson) would always call Mr. Belvedere random variations of his actual name (“Mr. Botulism” was my favorite), but she didn’t do so deliberately. (I met Matheson in the mid-90s, and she was very smart and kind.)

“Kamala” is a Sanskrit word for “lotus” and a popular name in Indian culture, particularly among Hindu families. Mangling Harris’s name is a less-than-subtle way of “othering” her. It’s a schoolyard bully’s tactic. (Watch the juvenile mess below.)

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You Know Kamala Harris Is Qualified Because Her Critics So Often Go Full Racist

Dyson gently reproached Mace: “Let me just say this, because this congresswoman is a wonderful human being, but when you disrespect Kamala Harris by saying ‘you will call her whatever you want,’ I know you don’t intend it to be that way; that’s the history and legacy of white disregard for the humanity of Black people.”

“Oh, so now you’re calling me racist,” Mace said with all the huffy indignation of a suburban racist in the wild. If you actually listen to Dyson’s words, it’s clear that at no point does he personally call her racist. He suggested her actions were racist (and not even intentionally so). He generously gave her the benefit of the doubt, which she didn’t deserve. Mace is less a legislator than a cast member on a reality TV show. She’ll do whatever it takes to get attention, even play the heel. However, as Kurt Vonnegut observed, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” She’s posed as a MAGA dolt for so long, she’s become the mask.

Mace responded with some impassioned gibberish about how Harris doesn’t know what a woman is and proceeded to defiantly mispronounce Harris’s name as the other CNN panelists kept correcting her. Thus, she achieved her paltry goal. She defines victory by angering decent people while gaining a news cycle. This is why I advise sticking with the Harris/Walz message and responding to gross bigotry with a calm, “Why are so being so weird?”

Not Breaking News: Kamala Harris Is Black. Donald Trump Is Racist.

Never call a Black man ‘boy’

Flush off her triumph, Mace posted a photo of herself drinking coffee “after taking on the radical Left.” She claimed that “the Left would rather talk about pronouns and pronunciation than policy” — an absurd lie considering Donald Trump’s policy-free, racist rants on social media and at his hate rallies. Someone called “End Wokeness” posted that Dyson and Boykin freaked out because “Kamala’s sacred & holy name is slightly mispronounced.” (It wasn’t an accident.) Mace responded, “These boys were so easily triggered.”

Mace is what’s known as a professional line stepper, so she probably fully understands the line she crossed here. Despite the racial history of her words, Mace will hide behind plausible deniability like a coward. She’s from South Carolina and serves in a racially gerrymandered district. She feels she can freely lean into Jim Crow etiquette, which constantly reinforced the second-class status of Black people, both legally and socially. They were never treated as equal in any way to white people of any status. This meant that adult Black men and women were only ever called “boy” and “girl.” In 1942’s Casablanca, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) refers to Sam (Dooley Wilson) as “the boy playing the piano” — not simply “the piano player.” Dooley was 56 and Bergman was 27 when the film was released, but “boy” wasn’t a reference to his perceived age. Jim Crow didn’t permit Black people the innocence of youth. Black children were sentenced as adults and imprisoned in adult penitentiaries. “Boy” was the polite racist’s way of saying the “n-word,” which they also freely used whenever they felt like it. When a court ruled in 2012 that an Alabama Tyson Foods plant supervisor’s reference to Black employees as “boy” was sufficient evidence of racism, the  amicus brief stated, “If not a proxy for [the n-word], it is at the very least a close cousin.” 

Black people never took kindly to this disrespect. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recalled riding with his father in 1930s Georgia when a policeman stopped their car after his father ran a stop sign. “All right, boy, pull over and let me see your license,” the officer said, and King Sr. replied, “I’m no boy.” Then, pointing to his son, “This is a boy. I am a man, and until you call me one, I will not listen to you.”

This stunned the cop who wrote King Sr. the ticket and let him leave with his life. That was unusual, not just for the 1930s but even in parts of the country today. During the Memphis sanitation strike, just before Dr. King’s assassination, many workers marched with signs that read “I Am A Man.”

It’s believed that young Black men during the Jazz Age started greeting each other with an affectionate “what’s happening, man” as a rebuke of the word “boy.” The revolution began with slang.

Blues singer Muddy Waters threw down the gauntlet in his 1955 hit “Mannish Boy,” when he declared, “I am man! I spell M, A child, N.” Waters was born in Jim Crow Mississippi but had recently moved to Chicago, where he recorded the song. His words were defiant and true.

It’s Vice President Harris to you

During Jim Crow, white people didn’t allow Black people courtesy titles of respect such as “Mr., “Mrs.,” “Miss,” “Sir,” or “Ma’am,” instead using their first names. Black women were addressed as “Auntie” or “girl.” Black men were “Uncle,” “boy,” or even mockingly “Doc” — anything to avoid acknowledging their human dignity. I remember the early days of my professional career when white liberal supervisors would insist I use their first name: “Mr. So-And-So was my father!” Yet, when my own father was born in 1940s South Carolina, there was no guarantee he’d ever be known as “Mr. Robinson” in white society. It’s a hard-earned title.

So, mispronouncing the vice president’s first name is insult to the injury of refusing to call her “vice president” or even just “Harris.” She isn’t Madonna or Cher. Back in the 1980s, when Oprah Winfrey became a phenomenon, everyone called her simply “Oprah.” You could rightly argue this was a demonstration of her ubiquity and worldwide renown, but historically, the shadow of Jim Crow etiquette was hard to escape. Dr. Maya Angelou wouldn’t tolerate even a young Black woman calling her “Maya.”

“I’m Ms. Angelou,” she said. “I’m not Maya. I’m 62 years old. I’ve lived so long and tried so hard that a young woman like you, or any other, has no license to come up to me and call me by my first name.”

Some people will insist that Harris willingly brands herself “Kamala,” but I still don’t think that gives her political opponents the right to such familiarity. Ben Stone on Law & Order put it best: “In polite society, sir, you don't call people by their first name unless they ask you to — I didn’t do that. You’re not a friend, and you’re certainly not a colleague.”

Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Nancy Mace aren’t Harris’s friends or colleagues. This petty assault on her given name perhaps proves Dr. Angelou’s point — when people start disrespecting you, they won’t stop until you make them.

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