Column
The Winner of the Vice Presidential Debate? Kamala’s Faces.
The Democratic nominee’s expressions told a story all women will recognize
There is a face that women make when men talk over them or say something ridiculous — a face we rely on when we can’t interrupt those men because doing so would label us angry or aggressive. It’s a look women know and exchange with each other often. It says, “I know you think you’re smarter than I am, and you are wrong.”
Sen. Kamala Harris made various iterations of that face throughout the vice presidential debate on Wednesday night, and those pointed looks did as much to win her the debate as her words.
Harris had a tough needle to thread: She knows that female politicians, Black women especially, are judged as unlikeable if they come across as publicly combative. But she also needed to press Vice President Mike Pence on the White House’s Covid-19 response, the rising tide of racism emboldened by the president, and Donald Trump’s unfitness for office. It was a tightrope act, and she pulled it off by letting her expressions do some of the heavy lifting for her.
