President Joe Biden suspended his reelection campaign on July 21 and almost immediately endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor for the top spot on the ticket. The grassroots response has been particularly electric. That night, #WinWithBlackWomen kicked off what became an amazing series of Zoom calls paired with online fundraising. There have been huge calls uniting so many groups—Black Men, white men, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, white women, South Asians, Native Americans, LBGTQ+ groups, cat ladies (with and without children), and so many more—around the former prosecutor, attorney general, and senator from California.
One of the latest groups starting to organize? Caribbean Americans.
Harris identifies as both Black and South Asian. Her father, scholar Donald J. Harris, is a Jamaican immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen, making Harris one of the more than 3 million Americans of Caribbean-West Indian heritage. The largest group are Jamaican Americans, with the largest communities in South Florida and the New York City metropolitan area.
And Caribbean women, like Shirley Chisholm, have long played a key role in our political history, and others continue to do so in all areas—from making laws to covering them.
Caribbean Matters is a weekly series from Daily Kos. If you are unfamiliar with the region, check out Caribbean Matters: Getting to know the countries of the Caribbean.
It came as no surprise when I saw a post on X, formerly Twitter, about one of the latest groups to mobilize around the Harris campaign, who are organizing Thursday’s call.
Thursday’s rally for Harris is hosted by Vote Caribbean, “a 501(c)(3) non-partisan, non profit based community of mission-critical advocates, political operatives, community leaders, Obama alumni and volunteers of Caribbean-American heritage who seek to build a Caribbean-American political and advocacy power base by fostering and advancing greater strategic initiatives & programming within the fabric of American civil society.” Shuttered after the 2021 U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia, Vote Caribbean is back in 2024 and determined to rally the community around Harris.
Already, there has been a great deal of excitement from the Jamaican diaspora about Harris’ campaign—in particular her history of care for the region. As vice president, Harris has held major meetings with Caribbean leaders.
RELATED STORY: Caribbean Matters: Celebrating National Caribbean Heritage Month and cultural ties to the U.S.
Harris spoke of her Jamaican heritage when she met with Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness in a meeting in March 2022.
RELATED STORY: Caribbean Matters: VP Harris visits the Bahamas to meet with Caribbean leaders
Internet trolls and hate groups have already challenged Harris’ “Blackness,” spewing epic stupidiy in efforts to alienate Black voters against her. Their arguments usually boil down to “she’s not Black, she’s Asian, or “she’s not Black, she’s Jamaican.”
Truth is, she’s both. Period.
Samantha Putterman, a staff fact-checker for PolitiFact, writes for Poynter about the confusion around Harris’ identity:
The African diaspora refers to the many communities of people of African descent dispersed throughout the world as a result of historic movements, both voluntary and involuntary.
During the more-than-400-years-long trans-Atlantic slave trade, an estimated 15 million African men, women and children were kidnapped from their homelands, forced into ships, and forced to endure a weekslong journey in crowded. filthy conditions before being sold into enslavement. The slave trade took millions of people to different regions throughout the Americas and the Caribbean.
In a 2020 op-ed, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie described how Jamaica was home to a brutal and violent plantation system and was a pivotal point in the slave trade.
Putterman then quotes Bouie:
“Many Jamaicans trace their origins directly to slavery and the mass importation of African captives,” Bouie wrote. “Based on a genealogical account by her father, there is a strong chance Kamala Harris is one of them. What’s more, many descendants of enslaved people in the Americas have European ancestry on account of the pervasive sexual violence whites perpetuated wherever slavery took root.”
There’s also the right’s “she’s descended from a slaveholder” attack. It relates directly to the sexual violence perpetrated against enslaved people—especially women. Media Matters for America writers Helena Hind and Jane Lee have compiled a long list of the spurious attacks:
Right-wing media — including the New York Post and figures such as Sean Hannity — are rehashing old attacks on Kamala Harris’ ethnicity by bringing up her reported relation to a slave owner in Jamaica. Since Harris announced her candidacy for president, right-wing media figures have absurdly used Harris’ lineage to call her ethnicity into question, with one accusing her of “pretend[ing] to be Black.”
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Right-wing media launched new attacks after Harris announced her 2024 candidacy.
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MAGA radio host Michael Savage urged host Greg Kelly to focus on Harris’ ancestry as a line of attack. “Everyone swept it under the rug. You should get that for your show on Monday. Her own father said, ‘Kamala, stop this stuff about slavery. We kept slaves as well.’ People shouldn’t forget that, Greg.” [Newsmax, Huckabee, 7/21/24]
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White nationalist streamer Stew Peters wrote, “Kamala Harris pretends to be black but her family owned slaves.” [Twitter/X, 7/23/24; Media Matters, 3/13/23]
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Rumble streamer David Freiheit (known as VivaFrei) posted: “They are already framing Kamala as the ‘black woman’, even though she’s half Indian, and her Jamaican father admitted to having a family tree going back to *slave owners*.” [Twitter/X, 7/21/24; Media Matters, 4/11/23]
I am one of those Black folks with a similar family tree. My Black great-grandfather is pictured just below. I’m told he “looked German.”
Dennis Williams was the son of enslaved Hannah Carter and born c. 1847 in Virginia.
There are hundreds of thousands of Black people with white rapist slaveholders and overseers in their family trees.
Aug. 1 is also celebrated as the anniversary of the 1834 slavery emancipation in much of the formerly-British Caribbean. Harris’ enslaved ancestors may have been freed earlier than Black Americans in the U.S., but the history of breeding farms and brutal treatment of Black Caribbeans is one that we cannot ignore.
We need to be aware of this dark history to refute the scurrilous charges denying and distorting Harris’ Black family heritage—including those made on Wednesday by the Republican nominee for president.
I’ll be reporting more on Thursday’s Caribbean American’s for Harris mobilization call in the coming days.
Till then, meet me in the comments for more on the attacks on Harris, and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.
