Aspiring Democratic Vice-President Kamala Harris flies straight into the wind of black, not quite black, and white debate

Ever wondered where we would be in Seychelles if we defined and segregated our political candidates, never mind our next door neighbours or in-laws, as black or white?

Well the ‘sois-disant’ democratic superpower called the United States of America, pretender of the greatest example to the world, unashamedly but shamefully does just that.During her 2020 presidential campaign, Sen. Kamala Harris, Democtatic-California, found herself at the center of a controversy about which Americans can claim to be Black, or Black enough —be-cause of both her biracial identity and her immigrant parents.

Born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, Harris was subject to a smear campaign insinuating that she was not Black at all —which began anew immediately after presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced she was his pick for the vice presidential nomination. After a July 2019 debate, critics took issue with her for discussing a topic they viewed to be most relevant to American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) —busing to racially integrate schools. Although Harris was bused to a majority white school in California as part of a desegregation campaign, her lineage didn’t include enslaved African Americans, the group such efforts targeted, her detractors argued. (Harris’ father, Donald, wrote in 2018 that his research suggests he and his daughters are de-scended from Black people enslaved in Jamaica.)

To have her Blackness questioned in this way must’ve been jarring for a woman who graduated from the historically Black Howard University, was born in Oakland, California —-hometown of the Black Panther Party -and has likely been viewed as Black by a majority white society.

But the questions about what constitutes Blackness aren’t new in the United States.When he ran for president, Barack Obama also faced questions about his racial identity, having grown up outside the continental United States without his Kenyan father. And when he identified as solely Black on the 2010 census form, some mixed-race activists openly expressed their disappointment with his decision to exclude his white heritage —even though he did not have the option to identify as biracial until a decade before, in the 2000 census, which took place well into his adulthood (and three years after he had begun serving in the Illinois state Senate).

For most of the 20th century, Americans either had to pick one race or “other,” a shift from even the late 1800s when the census included “racial designations for people with fractions of African ancestry.”

But Black or not-quite White, reactions to her being picked by the Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden has been mixed. Here’s a small sample.Peyton -Graduate: Kamala doesn’t shake the table enough for me in terms of her demands for things that I hold dear, such as universal healthcare, the total elimination of student debt, raising the minimum wage, and also her history as a prosecutor in California isn’t necessarily a strong mark on her resume for me.

I think that we kind of get carried away by ‘firsts’, especially as black people, by the ‘first this’ and ‘first that’, it’s just seen as a gigantic milestone.

But are you fighting for some of the values that the black community holds dear? Are you actually speaking to fellow black folks in the community about what they’d like to see and some of the policies that they would like to see implemented? I think that Kamala’s proposed policies are not what the black community necessarily needs right now.Kayla-Student: Still, she can bring awareness to black issues, she can bring awareness to needs of historically black colleges and universities, and awareness to the needs of minority students at predomi-nately white institutions.She can bring awareness to the needs of affordable education. It could be a lot of things that will able to affect not just the African-American community but the middle class as a whole. I can see a lot of great things coming from this.KJ -Environment advocate: I do believe that she is one of the most qualified people to be vice-president but I’m also not naïve and I understand that at this moment in history, she makes Joe look good.So, this is going to come down to key voters in swing states and whether or not Kamala can persuade them. When we say “is America ready?” What we’re really saying “is white America ready?” I hope they are.

Source: NewsAsia