Kamala and the American Gumbo Pot
They were all trying hard to be American, you know, not knowing what to keep and what to leave behind.
—James McBride, The Color of Water
In the quest to be true Americans, Republicans hew toward keeping, and Democrats hew toward leaving behind.
“Tradition, tradition! Tradition!” sings Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.
Tradition, yes, but how much? And which ones?
The modern usage of tradition evolved during the Enlightenment, in opposition to modernity and progress. But the tension between tradition and modernism is as old as human civilization, a constant pendulum swinging between behaviors that look backward, and improvisations that re-engineer established patterns. Im-pro-visation literally means un-fore-seen: never seen before. The word tradition derives from the Latin word tradere literally meaning to transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping.
But what do we decide to keep safe? On abortion, conservative Republicans claim to follow biblical tradition (though the word does not appear in the Bible). Progressive Democrats follow the tradition minted in 1973 by Roe v. Wade.
The question whether to safekeep or to abandon tradition comes into play in intriguing ways in the campaigns of the two presidential hopefuls.
Donald Trump gives voice to traditional themes — family values, law and order, and strong borders. But the voice is anything but traditional: free associative, abusive of his opponents, a tad short on facts. And while he voices such themes, he hardly embodies them.
Kamala Harris’s campaign has embraced what is surely the most hallowed of American traditions, a tradition saturated in modernity: freedom. Yet her discourse on the stump tends to follow traditional forms: evidence-based, logical, and reasonable. Anything but freewheeling.
Kamala’s Laugh
But then there’s her laugh. Her easy, free-flowing laugh is at odds with political tradition. Politicians base their authority on being sobersided. Trump does not laugh, unless it is an ironic smirk at the expense of his opponents. For the Trump campaign, Kamala’s laugh is one of her liabilities, a female weakness, proof that she’s weird. Compilations of her guffawing circulated online.
Which Harris supporters read as misogynistic if not racist. When the Dems flipped the script and applied weird to the entire Republican party — Trump, Vance, Cruz, Graham, et al. — the fit seemed far better.
Which Harris supporters read as misogynistic if not racist. When the Dems flipped the script and applied weird to the entire Republican party — Trump, Vance, Cruz, Graham, et al. — the fit seemed far better.
There's nothing in her persona that more perfectly expresses Kamala’s commitment to freedom than her laugh. That’s why Trump’s sobriquet, “Laffin Kamala,” hasn’t stuck. As The Times’ comedy critic Jason Zinoman argues, Kamala’s “laugh is one of her most effective weapons.” For many, Kamala’s happy convulsions make her more relatable. After years of Trump’s dire narratives about retribution and “American carnage,” the Vice President has injected a politics of joy.
And yet there is a traditional aspect to her laugh. She attributes her guffaws to her Indian mother Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, a medical researcher and an immigrant from a Brahmin family.
A professional woman in a demanding field and a Brahmin may have every reason to be a stick in the mud. Yet Kamala explained on Drew Barrymore’s daytime talk show that,
I grew up around a bunch of women who laughed from the belly. They laughed. They would sit around the kitchen drinking their coffee, telling big stories with big laughs…. And I think it’s important for us to remind each other and our younger ones, don’t be confined to other people’s perception about what this looks like and how you should act…. It’s really important.”
Those laughs convey freedom from confinement. They communicate modernity. The emphasis on “a bunch of women” says something new about that time, about gender and about those coffee meetings as a safe space apart from men.
Yet the story identifies her laugh not just with freedom but also with a cultural tradition she associates with her Indian background. Demeaned by Republicans as a mere DEI candidate, Kamala with her laugh introduces into American politics a tradition with thousands of years of history.
The Bhagavad Gita speaks often of the value and wisdom of laughter. We hear for example that “The one who does not brood over matters and keeps himself free from expectations maintaining a cheerful disposition attains the highest form of devotion.”
In what has now become the viral “coconut tree” meme — another of the Trump’s campaign’s targets — Kamala begins with one of her famed guffaws. But the narrative from which the excerpt-turned-meme is pulled couldn’t have been more about tradition:
“My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?
“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
Tradition is another word for context. You young people may think you write your story as if on a blank slate. But you must pay attention to tradition if you mean to change it.
A personal note: following Hurricane Katrina an influx of young New Yorkers moved to New Orleans “to make a difference.” It was New Orleans traditional culture that drew them, the music, the food, the diversity. They knew just how to fix it. But they soon learned that their smart, hip ways weren’t always well received.
Asian and African American
The traditions Kamala’s laugh keeps safe are doubly diverse. Born in Jamaica, her father Donald Harris was a Marxist economist at Stanford. Marxists are not known for ready laughs either.
Yet, Dr. Harris’s African roots dovetail with Dr. Gopalan’s big stories and big laughs.
The Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston captures this African tradition in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). The heroine Janie Crawford’s challenge is to find her charismatic voice and recover her sense of agency. She takes as her model the townsfolk on the porch of her husband’s country store as they trade “big lies.”
As Henry Louise Gates notes, “Lies is a traditional African-American word for figurative discourse, tales, or stories.” Janie likes these “big picture talkers … using a side of the world for a canvas”:
When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life [that is, exaggerations] made it even nicer to listen to.
For Janie, these big-picture talkers deploy metaphors (“pictures of their thoughts”) to embody a life lived with confidence, in the moment, in community. Such pleasure has purpose — to adorn a day otherwise held hostage to forced drudgery. Their improvised lies push back against the oppression they suffer daily.
Big lies are metaphors that signify. In Black culture according to Gates to signify is to charge a word or phrase with a razor-sharp difference beyond the white man’s understanding. It’s to say one thing and mean another only your fellows will grok.
As the great blues commentator Albert Murray commented, “the adequate metaphor [is] the most basic equipment for living. Without an adequate metaphor, you’re insane. You don’t have a story, you’re a ball of chaos.” The big liars’ metaphors give them the charismatic voice that equips them for living and brings order into their chaotic lives. It brings agency and community. As Zinoman points out, laughter is “not exclusionary but unifying.”
Janie’s townsfolk’s big lies build community. Trump’s big lies built a cult, tapped grievances, and promoted a conspiracy to undermine our most sacrosanct traditions: journalistic truth, one man one vote, the democratic process, the peaceful transfer of power.
Looking Backward and Forward
With roots in two traditional cultures but charged with a vision of change, Kamala’s laugh paradoxically looks both backward and forward.
Republicans posture about maintaining traditions. They deploy rank fictions like originalist readings of the Constitution to inform radical change (e.g. the Dobbs and Chevron decisions). Their Project 2025 calls for a radical and self-serving transformation of our political culture. Their ultimate fiction — or lie — is that white supremacy should reign in a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Trump’s candidacy seeks to return America to a nation contemptu of diverse traditions. Effortlessly, Kamala’s raucous laugh drags non-white traditions center stage, just when American traditions need all the fresh infusions they can get.
Kamala’s laugh is the curve ball the Democrats need in this election. It shouts freedom, then cuts the other way, embracing traditions and embodying the diversity that built America — not America the melting pot, but America the gumbo pot.
As New Orleanians know, nothing brings joy like your mom putting the gumbo pot at the center of the family table.
