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The Atlantic Explains Harris's Weird Introduction but People Still Have Questions

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  July 28, 2022 8:18 AM

Vice President Kamala Harris raised eyebrows this week during a White House event when she stated her pronouns and declared “I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.”

After widespread mockery, The Atlantic rushed in to offer some context as to why she made such a strange introduction. 

The event, held on the anniversary of Americans With Disabilities Act, was a discussion about the effects of Roe v. Wade being overturned on the disabled community. The odd remarks by Harris and other participants were “meant to accommodate blind and visually impaired audiences.”

One convention meant to accommodate blind and visually impaired audiences is a brief self-description by the speaker. Other speakers at the same event, all putative humans, did the same. I heard the same extraterrestrial boilerplate at a Microsoft virtual event that I discussed a few months ago, where the emcee and opening speaker said they were “an Asian and white female with dark brown hair, wearing a red sleeveless top,” and a “tall Hispanic male wearing a blue shirt and khaki pants.” That’s all Harris was doing: giving a quick aid for the blind. Self-description is meant to be helpful to those who need it and unobtrusive to others. But to those unacquainted with the practice, it sounds like a failed simulacrum of human speech, the idiom of a pod-person.

I am sympathetic to efforts to accommodate participation by as many people as possible. One of the arguments for unfamiliar practices like these is that by adopting them, especially at high levels, we make them familiar—so that announcing one’s pronouns, for example, becomes routine and people with unexpected pronouns will therefore feel less bashful when noting them. (I strongly suspect that social change doesn’t work like this, and that speaking in a way that people find off-putting mostly just alienates them from you. But I see the argument.) Similarly, we might thank Harris for pioneering a practice that all decent people will someday adopt, which is giving cursory visual self-descriptions to bring the visually impaired on a level with the sighted. (The Atlantic)

But that explanation didn't exactly clear everything up.