Posted 1 day ago by Moya Lothian-McLean in news
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The announcement that Kamala Harris will be Joe Biden’s running mate in his bid for the presidency has spurred mixed reactions.
They mainly focus around Harris’ history as a prosecutor and whether she will win over voters or alienate them, given her past in law enforcement.
But for some Republicans, it seems Harris’ ethnicity is what’s really perplexing them.
As Forbes reports, conservatives are moving to “discredit” Harris’ identity as a Black woman because of her biracial heritage.
Harris has an Indian mother and a Jamaican father and has said in the past she was raised as Black because that’s how America would perceive her.
But now prominent Republicans are making bizarre claims about racial purity.
White conservative pundit Mark Levin opened his show by saying “Kamala Harris is not African American”.
“She is Indian and Jamaica,” he said.
“Jamaica is part of the Caribbean, India is out near China.
“Her ancestry does not go back to American slavery”.
Incredibly, Levin seems to have forgotten there was slavery in Jamaica.
Quite a lot of it in fact.
And ‘African American’ is a term that’s been met with backlash in recent years for its lack of accuracy and implication that Black Americans whose families have been in America for generations, still somehow ‘belong’ to Africa.
Other Republicans seemed to have received the same memo.
Dinesh D’Souza, who was ridiculed last week for trying to defend President Trump mispronouncing ‘Thailand’, also decided to attack Harris for her ancestry.
His gripe? That Harris’ father can trace his genealogy back to a slave owner.
According to D’Souza, this means he can question Harris’ Blackness – despite the fact it is a horribly common story among many other Black individuals in the US who are descended from slaves.
“African American in the American context generally means having a direct relationship to the experience of slavery,” D’Souza said, during an appearance on Fox News.
“Kamala Harris’ father wrote an article in a Jamaican magazine several years ago [...] that he was descended from the largest slave owner in Jamaica, a fellow named Hamilton Brown”.
So it seems having Black ancestors who were assaulted by their white ‘masters’ apparently precludes you from Blackness now.... And it didn’t stop there.
Pro-Trump pundit Candace Owens also accused Harris of “playing” the “Black card” after previously discussing her Indian American heritage.
Because, as we’ve seen, you cannot possibly be two things at once.
Or maybe it’s just too many concepts for these people to handle?
Wait until they hear about intersectionality.
IN FACT RACISM IS INHERENT IN HINDUISM WHICH IS NOW INFECTING THE INDIA BODY POLITIC, AS IS CASTISM, 19TH CENTURY ARYANISM AND NATIONALISM.
THERE ARE BLACK INDIANS AND THOSE MORE PALE, THE TAMIL OF SOUTHERN INDIA AND NORTHERN SRI LANKA ARE BLACK AND SUFFER SYSTEMIC RACISM FAMILIAR IN NORTH AMERICA. WHICH IS WHY THE HINDU NATIONALISTS IN INDIA AND IN THE USA SUPPORT TRUMP.
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