Ancestry and Diversity

As is his wont, Donald Trump decided to throw a rhetorical grenade today.

"I've known Kamala a long time... She was always of Indian heritage... I didn't know she was Black until a couple of years ago when she happened to turn Black"

The media and the administration are apoplectic about this, which is silly because it was a major subject of discussion among Democrats when she ran for President in 2020. Reuters put out this fact check about it then. A whole lot of Democratic voters thought what he just expressed, which I think is an artifact of her diversity-candidate approach to politics: because there had been lots of black officeholders by the time she came of age but not many South Asian ones, she had prominently billed herself as "the first South Asian" whatever to get that "history making diversity!" headline. It's no wonder people knew that she had been billing herself as Indian but not as prominently or frequently as black, because they'd heard the line over and over again.

Perhaps they've forgotten how interested people were in this back then, so here are a couple more items on the subject from 2020. The Irish are interested in it too, because her Jamaican family claims descent from a prominent slave owner/trader who paid a huge damage compensation for their part in the slave trade. (So, she's Irish, and black, and Indian, and female, and you know, diverse.) Reuters’ fact check on the slave trading business is typical of the genre:

While it is true that Kamala Harris’ father claimed to be a descendant of a slave owner, Harris and her family’s relationship to Hamilton Brown remains unclear.  

In an article published by the Jamaica Globe (here), professor Donald Harris wrote: “My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town),” a town in Jamaica.  

According to the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership, Hamilton Brown was an Irish resident slave-owner in Jamaica, and founder of Brown’s Town (here). Snopes, which investigated this claim (here) in 2019, reported that Brown owned at least 121 and 124 slaves in 1826 and 1817, respectively.  

These in-depth Fact Checks by Snopes and Politifact (here) have determined that while there is no clear evidence to prove Kamala Harris is a descendant of slave owners, it is likely that she is a descendant of both slaves and slave owners. 

We've discussed the fact-checker and media love for the phrase "there is no evidence." Here we just get that "there is no clear evidence." But there is clear evidence: we have the direct testimony of her father, which was written down and published. Any historian would consider a direct, published testimonial to be evidence. That in fact is the primary and preferred sort of evidence with which historians work. You can perhaps argue that evidence does not suffice for proof, but you can't deny that there is clear evidence.

I imagine Trump is just throwing bombs because it's fun, but he does incidentally point out a major problem not just for Kamala but for the ideology she represents. The White House is responding that no one has any right to interrogate someone's identity; but if you're going to run a DEI program, in which preference points are assigned based on identity, you have no choice but to question the identities that people claim. Otherwise you end up with Elizabeth Warren cases everywhere. 

Further, there is a serious and unaddressed division on identifying as (say) a man/woman versus (say) black or Indian. In fact, let's use the American Indian for this example -- in Warren's honor, the Cherokee. The Cherokee will definitely interrogate your claim to be one of them, and they have a developed methodology for doing it. They defend this methodology in court and use it to deny some people (especially black people descended from Cherokee slaves) status as Cherokee. Because we have a very elaborate set of preferences and awards for verified Native Americans, businesses owned by them, land owned by them, and so forth and so on, this sort of interrogation is unavoidable. If you want a world in which no one can interrogate your identity, your identity can't be used to assign employment or benefits. If it is, others with whom you are in competition have a right to question whether you really deserved the preferences you received over them. They have standing, as the courts say.

When the Surgeon General of the United States adopts female pronouns and dress, however, we're told it's totally improper to question it. Yet here too, women have a lot of protections and advantages -- scholarships not least, but also physical spaces from which they can exclude men in moments of vulnerability -- that are imperiled if everyone can just identify and nobody can question it. So of course there are fights about this everywhere, in legislatures and in courts and in homes and schools. 

In addition, Trump is pointing to something that isn't often discussed because it's considered wildly impolite to mention, but that I wonder if a lot of black people don't have concerns about. I'm not the least bit black myself and don't pretend to be, but if I were I would wonder about how different not only Kamala but Barack Obama are from the Black American story. The smaller concern would be that they are each only half black, and are on the other side children of extraordinary privilege: on his white side Obama was a cousin of George Washington and descended from wealth and social connection in the white community; Harris' mother was a Brahmin who received advanced education 60 years ago, being about as well connected among the elite caste of India as Obama's white family was here. 

The greater concern is that neither of their black parents shared the Black American experience of slavery and Civil Rights. Obama's father was not descended from slaves or Freedom Riders; he was a Kenyan whose ancestors did not share any of the American experiences. Obama opted in without any of the historical lack of privilege that most Black Americans descend from, and which has defined their struggle. Harris' family, as discussed above, were in her father's generation self-declared descendants from slavers and slave traders, not slaves. 

Again, I'm not black and this isn't my fight. I can't help but think that if I were, though, I'd be asking myself how it was that the first black President and Vice President were both of this strange stripe: not really like us, not at all, neither by blood nor by lived experience. I'd ask myself why they both came from such privilege, and opted into our community only when they found an advantage. At least that's what I think I'd ask myself.

But again, it's not my fight. I wonder if it isn't a fight that just got started, though.