When President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he was suspending his reelection campaign and endorsing Vice-President Kamala Harris to succeed him, he gave Democrats new life. Within hours, the party was chasing its single-day online fundraising record. Seventy-eight-year-old Donald Trump has taken Biden’s place as the race’s senescent candidate, while the president is being hailed as a selfless patriot. Democrats are rallying around Harris as their presumptive standard-bearer at warp speed. But what should be a brightly lit path to electing the first Black woman president is fraught and uncertain — largely because of Biden’s hesitance to treat her seriously as a successor.

For all his accomplishments, Biden has spent the past four years engaged in a pattern of crude patronage with his Black supporters. Ever since Black South Carolinians resuscitated his presidential campaign in 2020, he has treated Black loyalty like a debt to be repaid by filling key positions with Black officials, starting with his running mate. Harris was his rival from the primary who, despite her ardent fan base, telegenic appeal, and obvious talents as a Senate-hearing interrogator, struggled to distinguish herself as a candidate. “Kamala the campaigner couldn’t live up to Kamala the idea,” lamented Politico after she dropped out in 2019.

But Biden’s criteria did not require Harris to be a proven campaigner, merely what she already was: a qualified Black woman. This was a limiting framework, emblematic of Biden’s famously clumsy approach to race and politics. Here was a man who,........

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