The birthers are back -- this time for Kamala Harris
But, as an old saying goes, all is fair in love, war and presidential campaigns. Social media researcher Caroline Orr found that Harris' presence in the debate led to a surge in tweets that challenged how black or American she was. Some were posted by accounts that Buzzfeed identified as bots. Harris can draw some modest satisfaction from this ironic sign of her success. She is smeared online because she matters.
Frankly, I don't claim to speak for all African Americans, but in my experience, blackness and other similar identity issues are determined by two factors: how we see ourselves and what others see when they see us.
Harris' debate argument was extraordinarily effective partly because of her recounting that as a child she was categorized by how others saw her and her sister.
"Growing up, my sister and I had to deal with the neighbor who told us her parents (said she) couldn't play with us because she -- because we were black," she said.
Personal experience was similarly central to her criticism of Joe Biden, who served as vice president to the nation's first black president but has drawn criticism from some of his rivals for opposing federally forced busing for school integration -- and for expressing a willingness to work with other lawmakers who hold views with which he disagrees, including a couple of prominent segregationist senators.
Citing her personal experience, Harris found Biden's busing opposition and cooperation with segregationists to be "hurtful," she said. She recalled, "There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me."
Although some have criticized her of playing the race card to win her argument -- and spark an overnight surge in her poll ratings and campaign donations -- her story worked. It got her point across because she and her sister were being judged, as Martin Luther King Jr., famously said, by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.
Amid bots and tweets, voters decide for themselves whether race matters in their vote. With that in mind, as Harris said in a March radio interview, we the voters "need to recognize when we're being played."
(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2019 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
