Anna Wintour stretched her blogging muscles on Sunday, putting up a post on Vogue urging Joe Biden to add a woman of color to his ticket in light of the renewed focus on the unjust murders of black Americans.
“We should understand that the violence against black people in this country—including the appalling murders of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota—is a shared national tragedy, one we all need to reckon with,” she wrote. “The need for change should fall especially on those of us who enjoy incredible privileges; we need to listen and learn and take action to ensure social justice and basic human rights for people of color in this country.”
Biden has committed to picking a woman for vice president, for better or for worse, and last week his camp was reportedly vetting Amy Klobuchar. Considering Klobuchar’s spotty record as a prosecutor in Minnesota, the very state in which cop Derek Chauvin killed Floyd—not the mention the fact that in 2006 Klobuchar did not prosecute Chauvin for another fatal shooting he was involved in—it seems like she’s not, uh, it.
Wintour (who, it should be noted, is a big part of the notoriously segregated fashion industry) has a solution:
Vice President Biden has already spoken with feeling and empathy about the death of George Floyd, but he has to do more: assume the mantle of president in waiting, raise his voice, and become the national leader we so desperately need. He must surround himself with the best and the brightest minds who represent all of America—and that means he should choose a woman of color to be his vice president, and he should do it soon. What an important symbol she will be for a country that is long and tragically overdue for new leadership.
In addition to Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Tammy Duckworth, Stacey Abrams, and Val Demings are all women of color who have been floated as possibilities.
This post has been updated to reflect that Sen. Klobuchar did not “fail” to prosecute Chauvin, as she was already a Senator when Chauvin’s case went before a grand jury.