Monday, August 17, 2020

Politics be damned: is she Black or isn't she?

I suppose it had to happen. Kamala Harris, Joe Biden's pick for Democratic running mate and potential Vice President of the United States, is suffering the slings and arrows of racial questioning and second-guessing. And, in America's current hyper-sensitive racial politics, she is getting questioned from both sides.
Young(-ish), female and black, Harris was almost the only possible realistic choice for Biden (imagine if he had chosen an old white guy!), but already her credentials, both as a black person and as an American, are being questioned. As far as I know, no-one is questioning her gender, although I wouldn't rule it out.
Ms. Harris is a lawyer and California Senator (only the second Black woman to be elected to the Senate, as it happens, and the first of South Asian heritage). She was born - and there is point of contention here - in Oakland, California. Her parents, now long divorced, are definitely Black (AND naturalized Americans). Her father, Donald J.Harris, is a Jamaican-born economist and professor, and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, now deceased, was a respected biology researcher from Tamil Nadu, India. Ms. Harris herself does not seem particularly Black to look at (I'm pretty sure I would not have guessed), and I wonder whether this figures at all in some of the accusations she is having to field.
Trump - he of little imagination, and the tendency to resort to the same tired old tropes over and over again - is of course revisiting his unfounded Obama "birther" accusations, just in case it influences a few undiscriminating Republican types, quipping, "I heard it today that she doesn't meet the requirements" ("I have nothing to do with it. I read somthing about it." Right! He may as well have started the sentence, "I'm not racist, but...")
But she is also, despite her popularity (recent polls show her favourability ratings as higher than those of Biden, Trump or Pence, and Biden's electability has gone up since her joining the ticket), seeing push-back from the other side of the fence, essentially questioning whether she is "Black enough"). For example, some progressive Black activists are claiming she is not truly African-American because she is not the descendant of slaves (what?!), and others that she opts in and out of Blackness whenever it is convenient (there may be some truth in this, and this is maybe a better argument, but still not a good one - as a Black female politician in a white man's world, you do what you have to do).
Well, no doubt she's well used to such barbs, if she has made it this far. But it seems a shame. And, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: why would anyone choose to go into a dirty game like politics?

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