Kamala Harris defies the soft bigotry of racial expectations
All of the chatter surrounding the historic rise of Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris sounds like an unfortunate trip through a Wayback Machine.
The “What is she?” questions about Harris, daughter of a mother from India and a father from Jamaica, sound eerily and perhaps inevitably similar to the questions that popped up in 2007 about how to label another rising candidate of color, Barack Obama.
Like Obama, Harris challenges the soft bigotry of racial expectations.
“We talk about her being African American,” mused Pat Robertson, a conservative media star and former Republican presidential candidate, after Joe Biden named her to be his running mate. “(But) her father’s from Jamaica. He isn’t from Africa. He’s from Jamaica. So she’s not really an American Black.”
Yes, she is. She was born in Oakland and, besides, where does Robertson, a Yale Law School graduate, think Black Jamaicans originally came from?
Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza put aside Harris’ Black lineage to observe on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program that, “Kamala Harris is descended from the largest slave owner — slave owner! — in Jamaica.”
Then he concluded, “Kamala Harris seems to be descended less from the legacy of, let’s say, Frederick Douglass than from the legacy of the plantation itself.”
Nice try, but Douglass, who escaped a Maryland plantation to become a renowned abolitionist author and diplomat, also was of mixed race, as are more than a few African Americans.
Rush Limbaugh joined the sarcastic chorus, angrily. “She’s not African American,” he growled on his national talk show. “She doesn’t have slave blood. She’s not down for the struggle.”
And who is? Certainly not Limbaugh, in my humble view.
...continued
(c) 2020 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
