Building on an accusation by GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris‘s “identity” flexes to suit her political purposes, Texas Senator Ted Cruz suggested today on social media that Vice President Harris might change her hair color.
Responding to and sharing an Axios article asserting a Harris “flip-flop” on building the wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, Cruz — a Republican being challenged for his Senate seat by Democrat and former NFL player Colin Allred — wrote simply: “Wait till she dyes her hair blonde….”
Wait till she dyes her hair blonde…. https://t.co/AC6xSjT4xX
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) August 27, 2024
[NOTE: Trump implied in a recent interview that Harris, who has a mixed racial heritage, emphasized her Black identity for political gain, saying: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”]
Cruz’s suggestion that Harris will dye her hair blonde is, on the surface, an accusation resembling Trump’s — that Harris will alter her own essence to meet the moment. (Whether such mutability is a desirable quality or a flaw is a matter of opinion.) With it, Cruz overtly implies that Harris’s principles are malleable like the rest of her, including her physicality and aesthetic.
Below the surface also, Cruz’s Harris-turns-blonde suggestion is loaded with cultural implications and bugaboos, including a racial subtext that feeds subtly into the great replacement theory and culture war friction over the shifting archetypes of American identity.
NOTE: Despite the immediately recognizable iconic blonde archetypes of such white culture figures as Marilyn Monroe, Pamela Anderson and Reese Witherspoon, blonde is also — more often these days — the hair color of choice for Black cultural icons like Beyonce, Cynthia Erivo, and Mary J. Blige.