U.S. Senator Kamala Harris can get away with calling herself “black,” an “African American,” a “person of color” and even a “sister.” What she can’t call herself is a “Descendant of U.S. Slaves” as a way to create a “political base” affiliation with the nation’s 2nd largest demographic group. Descendants of U.S. Slaves who call themselves “black” number 48 million behind 50 million German Americans.
While she can claim the “color” of the nation’s 2nd largest ethnic demographic, Harris can’t claim to be our “kind” as the descendant of an Irish owner of Africans stolen into Jamaica’s slave trade. According to Harris’ father, former Stanford University professor Donald Harris, she’s the descendant of Irishman Hamilton Brown who founded Brown Town in Jamaica.
Harris’ Jamaican father wrote how he was taught and he taught his children to “memba whey yu cum fram.” As a candidate for president of the United States, the senator from California’s problem is she can’t sell her family’s history with Jamaican slaves to an “identified” more than 48 million Descendants of U.S. Slaves. The number more than doubles when “One Drop of Black Blood Makes You Black” Americans like the late and legendary FBI Director John Edgar Hoover are added to the “Descendant of Slaves” equation.
Harris is half “Hindi” and half “Jamaican.” The two ethnic groups, combined, number fewer than 900,000 in the U.S. out of a nation of 320 million. 450,000 each. Most can’t get elected to city councils.
As a candidate for a national office Harris has no “ethnic political” base that will get her the votes to get there. It explains why “dreamers” have sought to shift the discussion of politics from “ethnic” to “identity.” Immigration in 1899 was capped at 3 percent to ensure no immigrant group became dominant over the existing White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) ethnics who controlled the nation.
With it now known this “dreamer” failed miserably in her attempt to connect her skin color and claimed “identity” as a “black or person of color” with over 100 million Americans who are the Descendants of U.S. Slaves, Harris’ campaign is done. No Barack Obama pass. The nation’s “first black” president got by because of his WASP and “one drop” mother.
Ann Dunham was mainly English. Her pre-Civil War ancestors date back to “colonial” Virginia in the 17th century. An African indentured servant named John Punch is her earliest ancestor here.
Despite her white skin, Obama’s mother was more a “sister” than Harris. It wasn’t his Kenyan father Descendants of U.S. Slaves embraced in Obama’s bloodline. He wouldn’t have made it to the Illinois senate campaigning to become the “first Kenyan American.” It’s better to call oneself an “African American” to connect in those political realities. The problem with that label is even a white apartheid-loving South African immigrant to this nation is an African American.
One of the undiscussed truths in American culture is the overwhelming majority of the nation’s 48 million WASP-named “Descendants of Slaves” are of mixed-blood “African and Anglo Saxon” ancestry. 18 percent of my DNA includes the same mix of English, Wales and Northern Irish ancestors as Obama’s mother. It explains WASP candidate and pre-Civil War American Joe Biden’s continued connection to this nation’s “Desendant of U.S. Slaves” demographic.
The only presidential candidate who “truly” seems to understand these ethnic nuances is Donald Trump; and his political messaging has been very “narrowly” aimed at the Descendants of U.S. Slaves. He seems to instinctively know Harris doesn’t speak for us.
Harris, like another Asian Indian dreamer, ex-Lousiana Governor Bobby “Piyush” Jindal, would prefer the nation’s 2nd largest ethnic demographic “forget about slavery” while continuing to push their “ancestors arrived here broke” story into one of triumph over legislative obstacles they never experienced. Harris wouldn’t understand that college and job set-asides were specifically limited, initially, to the Descendants of U.S. Slaves. The word “minority” was inserted into legislation to include aliens who’d experienced no historic legislative denial of opportunities.
The second companion to the “dreamer” strategy of ignoring slavery, and the Obama-like political strategy of denouncing both his pastor, Jeremiah Wright and Minister Louis Farrakhan, is for Harris, posing as “a black,” to show whites that she “as a black” does not affiliate with the civil rights leaders the Descendants of U.S. Slaves embrace.
Like Obama Harris distances herself from Rev. Jesse Jackson and Minister Louis Farrakhan because Russian Americans who call themselves Jews view the men as offensive. Rejection of them has been used as a litmus test for “white” support even though the majority of this nation’s WASP whites are not Russian friendly. WASP’s rounded up Russians for deportation before and after 1920. The Ku Klux Klan organized in Youngstown, Ohio to terrorize them out of the city. Being married to a Soviet as well as her immigrant background creates more subtle objections to Harris’ candidacy than she may realize.
Had the “blacks” connected to Harris been Descendants of U.S. Slaves, instead of her same-minded sister and other dreamers, she might have been advised her “I was that little girl” marketing strategy would piss us off. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas perfectly described some of our generation’s attitude towards the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s efforts towards forced integration and busing.
“I think segregation is bad, it’s wrong, it’s immoral. I’d fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don’t need to sit next to a white child to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.”
As a Descendant of U.S. Slaves who supported President George H.W. Bush’s decision to nominate Thomas, and who watched his televised U.S. Senate confirmation hearing, I read in the the Supreme Court justice’s thoughts on busing and education the cultural pride Descendants of U.S. Slaves have in our achievements and advancements during and after slavery.
As the largest group of Americans who were legislatively-deprived of opportunities, ignoring slavery and disrespecting civil rights leaders to appease a minority of 5 million Russian Americans or Soviets, has been the consistent and short-sighted perspective of so-called “black” dreamers like Harris.
Harris when she launched her “I was that little girl” campaign adopted the white perspective that because she attended school with whites here and in Canada, she was “more fortunate” than Descendants of U.S. Slaves who lifted themselves from zero percent literacy at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 to 98.4 percent in 1970.
Neither Harris nor Obama could relate to the reality that Descendants of U.S. Slaves do not see ourselves as inferior to people whose skin is white; nor do we see ourselves as ancestrally-disconnected from WASP’s with pre-Civil War roots to the nation. Unlike Harris, her last name didn’t come from a WASP plantation owner like my mother’s Arkansas “Davis” ancestors.
Our adage as a 66-year-old man born Negro in Cleveland, Ohio in 1953, and raised between St. Louis, Missouri and East Saint Louis, Illinois in the Samuel Gomper Homes between 1956 and 1969, was for us to be “viewed” as “equal” we have to be twice as good. We’ve simply demanded those in our way get out of it with their legislative obstructions to jobs and economic opportunities the unions Eastern Europeans brought here created.
An example is in Harris’ relationship with U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge. She and I led Ohio’s two most Descendant of U.S. Slaves populated cities as mayor. Me as 94 percent black East Cleveland, Ohio’s mayor. Fudge as the former mayor of 85 percent black Warrensville Heights.
Knowing Fudge’s resume in comparison to U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s, I know she sees herself as “vastly superior” to lead the U.S. House of Representatives. Pelosi’s father served as Baltimore’s mayor. She attended Trinity College to get a degree in political science. She has no known job skills other than the political jobs she held before being elected to the U.S. Congress after defeating Republican and attorney Harriet Ross in 1987 in a district that’s been Democrat since 1949. Pelosi never managed a unit of government that has to live under the laws she leads the House to discuss and enact.
Fudge is an attorney who led the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office as chief of staff for the late U.S. Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones. She served as Tubbs-Jones chief of staff in Congress. She successfully led Warrensville Heights as mayor over two terms. I would have loved her budget surplus.
On the substance of her government background alone, Fudge is better prepared to lead a Congressional discussion about how local police random license plate searches are daily violating laws Congress enacted telling them not to; misconduct that U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Karen Nelson Moore blasted as being tolerated by judges who never read the laws Pelosi and Congress enacted.
The fact Fudge is not viewed by her colleagues as more prepared to lead than Pelosi epitomizes the “twice as good” instead of “inferior” thinking dreamers get wrong about Descendants of U.S. Slaves. Harris’ with her own words expressed how her parents didn’t want her attending school with Descendants of U.S. Slaves they saw as less fortunate. Fudge is even better prepared than her candidate to lead the nation.
From her own deeds Harris’ election to the office of California’s attorney general was not an ethnic achievement for the state’s Descendants of U.S. Slaves population; and that’s her political problem going forward if she doesn’t drop out of the Democratic primary.
She’s got no political base. She misjudged the complex truth about race in this nation that Descendants of U.S. Slaves are just as WASP in our thinking as any other descendant of “pre-Civil War” citizens; and politics is all about your “base.”
Add to the lack of a political base and there are too many known facts about Harris that makes ex-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s “other women” seem offensive. After her election to California attorney general, Brown told a reporter she called to tell him she’d indict him if he stepped off a sidewalk. Fuck the married brother she fucked to get her resume built up; and that’s another problem dreamers don’t exhibit. Ethnic loyalty. At least not to U.S. Descendants of Slaves whose ancestors were sold out and sold by their own kind.
Harris doesn’t seem to know her own actions show she doesn’t uplift the people who uplift her. We’re not going through another “Barack Obama.”
