The Impossible Youth of Kamala Harris

Aka why does she look so much younger than Tim Walz?

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Does Kamala Have an Anti-Aging Problem?

Now that we’re cat lady sign on the yard for Harris/Walz, my kids are starting to get interested in the election. They know their grandparents in Philadelphia have been out canvassing a ton (no pressure Pennsylvania, but we’re literally all counting on you!). They know Harris killed at one debate and Walz not so much at the other. We talk a lot about what’s at stake, but the other day my 11-year-old threw me a question that caught me off guard. She said: If Tim Walz is 60 and Kamala Harris is 59, why does he look so much older than her? 

The answer, of course, is patriarchy. 48 percent of women aged 50 and older reported experiences of age discrimination in a 2021 AARP survey, especially in the workplace. In a more recent Canadian survey, almost 60 percent of female participants said ageism had impacted their career progression. Joe Biden may have been too old to run for reelection, but Kamala Harris would not be considered a viable candidate if she were any older. (Yes, Hillary Clinton was 68 when she ran 2016; and she fought ageism all the way to the polls.) Now that Harris is running against 78-year-old Donald Trump, communicating her relative youth—via smooth skin and no visible gray hair in her flawless silk press—is an essential campaign strategy. She wears stilettos or Converse sneakers; both are “young” shoe choices that frankly, lack the arch support I require in my 40s. Kamala is Brat; she is popping up on Call Her Daddy; she is coyly cursing on Colbert. Everywhere she goes, Harris exudes the kind of radiant energy we have been taught to associate with youth.

In contrast, Tim Walz’s brand is “nice Midwestern dad.” Balding and a little schlubby is an expected part of that package. Yes, we automatically read him as older, and that is its own form of ageism; the memes about a California 60 versus a Midwest 60 make that clear. But we don’t require beauty or reproductive value from men, so we code “older man” with experience and wisdom instead of irrelevancy. Now imagine a female Tim Walz. She’d have a mom bod, she’d remember to bring a cardigan, she’d wear cargo capris and sensible flats with arch support. That woman doesn’t make it onto the ticket.

But we’re not just seeing a gendered double standard play out on the Walz/Harris ticket. We’re also seeing how a white man and a Black woman are held to wildly different expectations about the kind of appearance that communicates professionalism, competence and leadership. When I first mentioned that I was musing on this essay idea in Chat, several of you pushed back to say, no, we’re not seeing a double standard in play here—Kamala Harris just happens to look younger than Tim Walz because “Black don’t crack.” And it’s true that darker skin tends to wrinkle less than lighter skin because melanin protects against visible signs of sun damage. But we aren’t just seeing smooth skin (that may or may not have also benefited from cosmetic procedures). We’re also seeing calculated choices about hair, clothes and so much more. Every inch of Harris and Walz’s appearances are up for discussion on the campaign trail. And their advisers have decided that she needs to perform far more beauty labor than he does, to show up as electable. 

In fact, Black writers and researchers have repeatedly pushed back against “Black don’t crack” as some kind of unequivocal perk of Blackness. “Surely saying things like, ‘Black women don’t age,’ and the pressure that comes with that, is a part of the reason that many millennial and Gen X Black women are intently focused on preserving their looks,” wrote Keeks Reid for Elle in 2022. “If my skin starts sagging, my jowls become heavier and wrinkles set in, am I letting the team down?” She describes “the push-pull” of feeling anxious about her own visible aging signs, yet also shamed for employing preventive measures she’s not supposed to need, as a Black woman. “Until we let go of the ‘Black don’t crack’ slogan that we have clung onto for decades, we won’t ever be free to age as we please.”

Stephen Maturen, Getty Images

The myth that Black women don’t age also belies the reality that chronic high stress and experiences of prejudice contributes to higher rates of adverse health outcomes at earlier ages, a process that public health scholar Arline Geronimus calls “weathering.” Her research has found that Black women in their 40s are an average of 5.7 years older, physiologically, than their white peers. “Youthful-looking Black women with swiftly aging bodies are literally a sick irony,” writes Alicia Smith-Tran, PhD, in her recent article “Pushing Back on ‘Black Don’t Crack.’” “[This is] a high price to pay, considering that a youthful appearance is not always as beneficial to Black women as one may assume.” Dr. Smith-Tran, who is an associate professor of sociology and comparative American studies at Oberlin College, told me she’s frequently mistaken for an underclassman by colleagues. This is not an asset at department meetings.

So this is the other layer to Harris’s appearance performance. She has to look younger than Donald Trump. She even has to look younger than her running mate. But she can’t look too young to be president. And Dr. Smith-Tran’s research shows that Black women are often assumed to be younger—and therefore less experienced and competent, than they actually are. One 57-year-old deputy director for a national nonprofit in Smith-Tran’s study said she regularly shares her age in order to reassure people she’s old enough to have her job or to combat misperceptions that she must have had her now-adult children as a teenager. Other women interviewed talked about how they’re never sure if they’re being talked down to because of their race, gender, or perceived age—or all three at once.

Ageism, like anti-fatness, is often an offshoot bias of misogyny and racism; both can be a slightly more socially acceptable way to make the same oppressive point. “We live in a youth-obsessed society,” says Dr. Smith-Tran. “But many of the compliments Black women receive about their perceived youth are used to mask racist and/or sexist assumptions about their leadership skills.” 

JOSH EDELSON, Getty Images

In this way, assuming that Kamala Harris’s relative visible youth is “just because she’s Black” ignores the significant mental load she’s carrying around the performance of her face, hair, and body. “A Black woman may have to think about, ‘Okay, this is the audience I’m talking to today. What outfit should I wear? What shoes should I wear to make sure I seem approachable? How should I speak?” says Dr. Smith-Tran. Michelle Obama wrote about navigating these pressures in her memoirs as the nation’s first Black First Lady, who was also on the receiving end of constant hate and vitriol about her appearance. It is perhaps not surprising that she also describes somewhat obsessive eating and exercise habits and spent so much of her time in the White House focused on making kids thinner. “There can be professional and social capital gained when [Black women] literally shrink our bodies,” Jessica Wilson, MD, RD, author of It's Always Been Ours: Rewriting the Story of Black Women’s Bodies told me when she came on the podcast last year. “Because we become less literally and less of a threat to people around us, more palatable.

The Whiteness of Not Wanting to Diet Anymore.

Harris has to be pretty, but not too pretty. She can’t be hot, but she also can’t show up disheveled in any way, or seem completely non-fuckable. In contrast, “we have plenty of empirical research to back up that how white men speak and present themselves is seen as the norm, and therefore automatically professional,” Dr. Smith-Tran notes. So Harris must invest far more effort, time and strategy in her appearance than her white male counterparts, striving to hit the precise, right note of “professional pretty”—and even then, says Dr. Smith-Tran, “She’ll be the one that gets more scrutiny.”

So far, it seems like Harris is threading this impossible needle. “...Because there is no playbook for a Black female presidential candidate of any kind, much less a biracial one with South Asian heritage, that means Harris may not be judged by the standard that has doomed female candidates,” wrote Tressie McMillan Cottom for the New York Times in August. “Against so many expectations, Harris looks and sounds like a president, even though no other president has ever looked like her. That in itself takes a remarkably nuanced appreciation for how race, gender, class, power, leadership, perception and politics actually work.”

I wish this kind of aesthetic performance wasn’t asked of Harris, or any Black woman in a leadership role. I wish I didn’t have to explain to my daughter that how she looks will always be factored into how good she is at any job; that women, especially Black women, are expected to control our bodies in order to be deemed capable and worthy. But since this is the world we live in, thank God Harris is so freaking good at the game.