I’m Black. Kamala Harris is Black. So are millions of Black people who have multiple heritages.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
As Trumpublicans try desperately to find something, anything to attack VP Kamala Harris with, their recent resort to challenging her “blackness” has not gone over well. The sheer stupidity of questioning someone’s “race” given the rules laid down with its invention, which have been in place here for hundreds of years is weak tea, and has unleashed a massive pushback.
As a cultural anthropologist, whose area of study was racial hierarchies in the Caribbean and the U.S this is not my first venture in writing about the subject here at Daily Kos. I wrote Teaching about "race" in the US. Part 1 in 2009, a year after I joined here, following up in 2011 with Teaching about Race: 101 (there’s a quiz attached — if you haven’t taken it, please do)
What is key in all the ways Black people have been socially constructed as a “race” here, is the rule of “hypodescent” also known as the “one drop rule.”
For years, racial classification in America was determined – for African Americans – on the basis of hypodescent or the “one drop” rule. The hypodescent rule meant that any degree of African ancestry was sufficient to classify the person as “Negro” or “Black.”
Attempts to precisely define degrees of racial intermixture were expressed through commonly used terms until the 1940s. The offensive descriptors mulatto (one half black), quadroon (one-fourth), octoroon (one-eighth) quintroon (one-fifteenth) and mustee (one sixteenth) were all in regular usage. It has been estimated that at least three-fourths of all people defined as “black” or African American have some white ancestry. Hypodescent had implications of racial purity. The widely held belief was that anyone unable to pass for white – in the context of the U.S. racial hierarchy – was assigned the lower status of being non-white or Colored.
Ironically, that one drop has given the Black community some of it’s most powerful historical figures.
Heh. Here’s an example:
Here are two recent stories addressing the issue of Harris’ blackness.
Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote:
Suggesting that there is something contrived about a mixed-race person identifying as Black assumes that the choice wasn’t already made for her.
When I was a child, my dad sat my older sister and me down in our living room and explained to us the rules of race in America. A Black man born into a Mississippi where Black boys could be lynched for merely standing too close to a white woman, he met my white mom in 1972. That was just a few years after the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia finally struck down 300 years’ worth of laws prohibiting people who descended from slavery from marrying people whose ancestors had enslaved them. In other words, Dad held no illusions about how race worked in our society and felt it was his duty as a parent to prepare us. Our mother might be white, he told us, but in this country, that fact was irrelevant to how we would be seen and treated. She might be white, but we were Black.
What my dad said that day when I was an elementary school student merely confirmed an understanding that I already had. I grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins and my grandmama from my dad’s side as just another child in a big Black family, my mom most often the only white person at family events. Several times a year, we’d travel about an hour out of town to rural Iowa, where we’d spend time with my white grandparents, who loved us dearly but who existed in a completely white world that we were never quite fully a part of.
I cannot say exactly how I knew I was Black before my dad sat us down, but I knew. Everyone knew. With my white family I was not white but part white. With my Black family and in the rest of America, I was Black. In American society, this race rule is so embedded that it is not even questioned.
Teresa Wiltz wrote:
What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About Race in America
I’m Black. So is Kamala Harris.
For most of its history, America decreed that anyone with any African ancestry was Black — and rumors of purported Blackness could derail a career, a marriage, a life. Now, the irony is that some feel comfortable accusing those same people of making up their Blackness altogether — or not being “fully Black” if they come from multiple racial backgrounds.
But the problem with trying to decide who qualifies as Black and who doesn’t is that there are many, many ways to be Black in America, thanks largely to slavery.
I’m Black and I have two Black-identifying parents who also had two Black-identifying parents. You have to go back generations to find the white folks in our family tree, but their existence is there, evident in the texture of our hair, the hue of our skin, the slant of our noses. (And in our 23andMe genetic testing results.) We are the result of centuries of miscegenation, generations of Black biracial people marrying other Black biracial people (and the occasional Native American) again and again and again, descendants of both the enslaved and the enslavers, born perhaps of love, but most certainly, from rape. In the U.S. — but not so much in other countries — that potent gumbo of DNA makes us (happily) Black.
Black folks on twitter have continued to push back:
For those of you who are not-Black, Black hair is something that is a major discussion point and a “Black marker” for us. Follow the discussions about “The Crown Act”
Where Harris is concerned — there is much discussion among Black folks that her choice, for her hair type is to wear a “silk press.”
There was quite a humorous response to her hair “going back” during her trip to West Africa.
And her silk press mention in conversation with Queen Latifah:
White folks don’t have long discussions about silk presses. Kamala Harris is Black. Yes — she’s also got Tamil roots in India.
End of story.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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You would be hard-pressed to find an American who lived through the 1970s and doesn’t remember the launch of President Nixon’s War on Drugs, a thinly veiled crusade against his political opponents and Black Americans. Presented as the cornerstone of Nixon’s purported public safety strategy, it’s now commonly acknowledged to have been nothing short of a social, economic and human rights disaster — with repercussions Americans are still experiencing today. But what does it have to do with abortion rights?
Louisiana’s governor recently signed into law a bill criminalizing the most common form of abortion care in America: medication abortion. This extreme new law categorizes mifepristone and misoprostol — the two medicines most commonly prescribed to induce abortions — as Schedule IV ‘dangerous and controlled substances,’ alongside Xanax and Valium. While the bill contains an exception for pregnant people found in possession of the medications, anyone else without a prescription can be charged with a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
This near-total abortion ban pushed through by far-right local politicians will only exacerbate Louisiana’s dire maternal mortality crisis, which has seen low-incomeBlack Lousianians suffer a disproportionately high rate of preventable deaths. In effect, this ban has ushered the War on Drugs into the realm of abortion care, sentencing pregnant people—particularly Black pregnant people—to profound, preventable harm.
When Nixon first rolled out his infamous anti-drug campaign in 1971, he used it not as an effort to curb drug use, but for political purposes: associating leftists and Black communities with drug use and then criminalizing and marginalizing them in the public mind. He was horrifically successful at achieving these objectives, but the campaign’s reach didn’t stop there.
Empowered by Nixon, federal and state governments created drug categorization schedules deeming certain drugs highly dangerous, and then attached sometimes egregiously long prison sentences to their illegal use and distribution. Prosecutors possess total discretion when it comes to who they charge with what crime and how aggressively a defendant should be punished. And some prosecutors across the U.S. took that power and ran with it. Between 1980 and 2008, state prison populations for drug offenses increased by a whopping 1,216%. Black people have borne the brunt of this incarceration explosion: Black people are incarcerated for drug offenses at nearly six times the rate of white people, despite similar rates of drug use.
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