Hey, do you all remember jamming to the song “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight”? No? Well, sorry if you missed out on that ridiculously racist song from Sunday school days. Speaking of colors, what color are we accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of being (or not being) today?
Whether you consider her ‘Momala’ or ‘Copala,’ ‘QueenVP’ or ‘Homicidal Harris,’ one thing’s for certain: she’s Black. Or is she? One of the oldest critiques floating around the world wide web is that she is “Black when it’s convenient.” Similar to the birther craze that former President Barack Obama was subjected to before and during his presidency, Harris has Sherlock Homeboys digging into her past and dusting off their old race science textbooks in an attempt to somehow prove or disprove her ethnic and racial identity—which is just racism pawned off as political analysis.
The weird (yes, that word) thing is, for people who claim to be totally not obsessed with her race and definitely not obsessed with making race an issue, they sure seem concerned with her race. The attacks on her personhood have already gone above and beyond what other candidates experience given that in an official GOP strategy memo she’s painted as: a middle-aged hag who lives in a cave with her 800 cats; unqualified to lead because her womb’s as empty as Jesus’ tomb; and hatching a master plan to suppress the aromatic scent of electricity.
If I weren’t merely an outside agitator, I’d be sure to only cast my ballot for someone who’s birthed their own children, just like all the previous presid— wait, what? Anyway, Kamala cackles like Satan or something. You see, it doesn’t matter what her policies look like because Kamala embodies something that makes her a target in ways that other candidates are privileged to avoid. She’s a Black woman. Even as a mixed-race Black woman, she has no White side to lean into because the complexity of her mixedness still makes her an “other.” It almost seems like a David Attenborough nature documentary, only now we’re watching alabastarians come to the realization that mixed race people do in fact exist.
In any case, it’s 2024 and race science is back in fashion, so let’s grab our calipers and do some skull-measuring! MAGA isn’t just ready to make America great again and again, it’s ready to lend a hand when it comes to the determination of who is or isn’t Black. And I for one am inclined to assume that right-wingers with no understanding of the history of race, racism, race science, or racial hierarchies are excellent arbiters of Blackness and racial identity.
Go on, lean into attacking Harris’ personage. Show her you’ve got absolutely no respect for her, and will hyper-focus on one thing (like her laugh or race) and minimize another—even things like continuously mispronouncing her name. It’s easy enough to stress the second “a” in Kamala (pronounced calm-uh-lah), but why would we do that when Donald Trump “couldn’t care less” if he mispronounces it? Who cares, right?
We may not care, but as speed-talking right-winger Ben Shapiro says, “facts don’t care about your feelings.” Hell, even he picked the lock on the box his ventriloquist keeps him in to tweet about the weird racial attacks on Harris. Facts are facts. Oakland-born Kamala Harris’ father is a Jamaican American Stanford professor emeritus, and her mother was an Indian American biomedical scientist. The two met and fell in love while both were involved in the civil rights movement.
Since being “Indian” and “Jamaican” doesn’t describe race, she can determine from her roots that she is both Afro- and descended from an Asian woman of color—which means she’s a twofer, not simply made with one racial ingredient. The operative pronoun here (sorry in advance to those afraid of pronouns) is “she.” SHE determines how she identifies; not you, not me, not Trump’s failed lawyer who, contrasting herself to Harris, botched her own zinger by declaring that, “I know who my roots are.”
In other words, US-born Harris is the product of Black and Brown love; she’s biracial, has African heritage on one side, and can look ambiguous if she wants, though she can’t pass as a White girl (a privilege we leave to real-life White-girl Rachel Dolezal).
Speaking of another White girl: remember when war-monger Hillary Clinton ran for office? Regardless of what one thinks of her terrible international policies, she was on the receiving end of some horrific misogyny. As a Black woman Harris will receive all that misogyny—but with additional adjectives. Misogynoir is basically sexism with a side helping of anti-Black racism aimed at Black women. Unlike getting something good for your soul like an extra side order of curly fries with your Popeye’s Chicken family box special, a side helping of misogynoir is very particular and exceedingly cruel. Nothing is off limits to diminish a target. Your body. Your hair. Your face and features. Your color. Your bone structure. Your mannerisms. Your skills. Your education. Your intelligence (or lack thereof).
But what do I know? Well, as a fellow woman of Afro-Indo Caribbean heritage I think I got this one. At times we’re the P**i racial slur. Other times we’re the N-word. Sometimes we’re neither Black enough nor Brown enough at all. (Some predatory grifting gurus seem to think we’re all actually melatonin rich, but who can afford to sleep in this economy?)
If we step aside to let our more melaninated cousins speak, we’re accused of being ashamed of our heritage. If we’re too loud about Black pride, we’re taking the limelight because we’re only half Black. Balancing is a tricky thing, complicated by being a different binary than Black and White. Black and Brown? What even is that? In a sense, Blackness is flattened; neither complex and multi-faceted, nor reflective of a shared history among a diaspora. It’s exclusive and yet elusive.
Don’t get me wrong, anti-Blackness is a horrible thing whose heaviest blows are dealt to those who aren’t mixed, have no skin privilege, and aren’t read by the world as “ambiguous.” But, while people argue over what percentage of Blackness Harris has, the fact is (just like Obama before her), as long as she occupies a position of power she’s too Black for racists. She’s already referred to as the “DEI hire” or “DEI candidate,” which we know has become a dog whistle for the N-word. She has the ability to trigger racism across the country—and globe, really. Maybe she can somehow channel this hate as a global unifier.
Just like Lady Di’s favorite daughter-in-law, Meghan Markle, who’s also mixed race and was never Black (enough) until she gained a powerful (albeit problematic) role in an outdated monarchy that was losing public affection faster than the Windsor men lose their hair. If she hadn’t injected a little—what’s the word?—Blackness into the family tree, the British public might focus on expelling the family of hemophiliac inbreds that built its obscene wealth through colonialism via the blood, sweat, and tears of a global populace it perceived as beneath them.
And, as has been revealed, Meghan is now too Black for the royals, blamed for every trial and tribulation this group of grifting parasites encounters. Meghan is basically a modern-day Helen of Troy or the “little jerk” from Home Alone, both of whom were thrust into a situation and blamed for things out of their control.
In a nutshell, to be Black is to have a root and heritage from the African continent. It’s a unifying attribute that connects all of us with Afro heritage either on the continent or in the diaspora whose families ended up across the world through migration, immigration, or the Middle Passage. To be Black, either in part or non-mixed, is what helps us connect as a global family and community when many of our archives have been erased and destroyed. Sometimes our histories point to unspeakable violence that resonates in the present through generational trauma.
And, like any family, we secretly hate that one cousin—you know, the attention seeker, the loud one, fadda gawd—and of course we will fight about food via diaspora wars every day of the week. But we are connected, inextricably, through time, history, geography, and shared struggles.
Speaking of the Middle Passage, several no-purpose flour people have, as a kind of accusation, highlighted that Harris’ ancestor was a White plantation owner in Jamaica. Nothing says “child left behind” like the failure to understand that “[White] enslavers routinely sexually violated the people they enslaved, which is how Kamala can be related to a plantation owner.” I’m not sure what sort of “gotcha” that story was meant to be, but if there’s any takeaway for Harris, it’s that she needs to put more money into our education system.
There is a valid critique around Harris’ race, similar to that of Obama’s. Like the former president, Harris is not a descendant of chattel slavery in the US and isn’t a generational African American. An interesting question would be to discuss what scares the US so much about a candidate who is a generational African American. And yes, there’s a valid critique of how her own upbringing and privilege shaped her life and career.
Perhaps there’s a watering down and “Whitening” of herself that, at times, has erased her connection to Blackness. Did she aspire to be “White” and did that shape her early career and policy making? Important questions, one would think. Does she have rhythm? Debatable. Does she over-hype a Blackness that some might think is, well, ‘overhyped’ given that she kind of claps on 1 and 3? Possibly. Discussions around aligning with Whiteness for power would yield a much more interesting and honest critique than accusing this woman of not being Black.
And of course, she’ll never escape this particular interrogation. It’ll be something ridiculous because the Right probably likes half of her policies and doesn’t want to admit it because she’s a B-B-Bl-… a woman. Perhaps we can nudge the Republican VP-nominee and Mountain Dew defender, JD Vance (whose various birth certificate alterations don’t appear to be of concern to the Right), to weigh in on her make-up skills since he’s so precise with his eyeliner.
Look, I’m not telling you to vote for a Black woman or an orange person (whose running mate may want to pick up some better internet-search skills using the incognito option). Since I’m probably not mature enough to vote in any election, I’m off the hook. But whether or not we agree or disagree with Harris’ candidacy or record we can agree that the misogynoir she experiences is inexcusable. Personally, I think people should vote for someone based on their policies—or, if all else fails, I guess one could overthrow the two-party system?
I may not have much in common with Kamala in terms of policy, but I do know that, as another mixed-race Black woman, our mere existence offends. I’m okay with that, and I’m fairly certain Kamala might agree too. Identity politics is often lambasted as some sort of “Left tactic” but the truth is that the right-wing has used rigid identity groups and categories to maintain power and control existences.
While people pore over Harris’ DNA, either to prove that she’s not a quintessentially “American girl” or to see whether she should be invited to next year’s cookout, past and present policies are being ignored, our planet is on fire, the gap between rich and poor steadily grows wider, and genocides continue to run rampant across regions where Black and Brown people are ignored, diminished, or erased from the earth. This is the Right’s tactic. The world is frighteningly out of sync with what it means to be human, never mind what it means to be Black or Brown… or orange.
