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I think there is a legit question of whether she is black. She is just as much black as she is white. If someone described Kamala as white, I think people would say you are crazy.
What does it mean to be black? Is it ethnicity and if so how much? Is it experience? Is it “she looks black”
For the sake of the dominant American culture, "black" means whatever they want it to mean as long as they get to call people that don't agree racist. It's how you get affirmative action policies that benefit literal foreign political royalty in the US.
America is race-obsessed, likely because their founding document and national spirit cannot come to grips with the fact that unequal outcomes exist. They have spent ages wrestling with the question of why success and wealth is not equally distributed among individuals in a land of supposed equal opportunity. This is why they're so desperate for a black female president. Not because it'd make a better president, but because it'd be evidence that the universalism they believe in isn't broken.
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The point is that while Kamala really SHOULD be vulnerable on that front, it's Just Not Done to question the blackness of a claimed-black politician, particularly if you're not black yourself.
Trump, characteristically, does not care what is Just Not Done. I doubt the pearl-clutching about it is going to hurt him, even if questioning her blackness isn't a winner either; by now that Trump does not obey (often progressive-defined) social conventions is pretty well baked in.
Harris has a greater claim to being black than Obama, since Obama grew up with his white mom and grandparents. That Harris is not acculturated to Black struggles because her Jamaican father was an academic who mixed with polite company instead of living the black experience is only mildly inconvenient for Harris.
Harris does not LOOK black. Her hair is flowing, she is so pale she doesn't even count as high yellow, and she talks like AOC instead of Cori Bush. Harris has little claim to the black experience even in California, and to her credit she is not running on her blackness the same way Obama did (maybe because Obama is a deft operator whose political presentation is unmatched since Bill Clinton).
Besides and lets be real here, is running on blackness a win condition? Harris is aware that the balancing game of democratic turnout and normie turnoff does not favor evoking MLK tier struggles, much less the poisoned Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan style polemics that Blacks actually paid attention to. Ibrahm Kendi has thankfully been relegated to the dirt where he belongs, so the dems at least do not need to listen to him as much as they had to during 2018-2021.
She grew up in Berkeley and Canada.
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Didn't her parents split up when she was young and she grew up with her indian mother?
Shit, really? I keep seeing paeans to Donald Harris plastered across Reddit, especially that black and white photo of him carrying Kamala as a baby. Guess I fell victim to the narrative shaping.
In which case then Kamala has the same case to black identity as Obama. Mother raising a child in the mothers culture with no input from the sperm donor. Any 'blackness' these miscegenated monocultures pretend at is a construction formed in university for social purposes.
Obama at least sported a fro and played basketball. Does Harris make a single pretense at black presentation?
this is from a bit over a year ago, kind of a weird thing where she went and bought some records. to me this comes across badly because why are you buying these basic albums only now?
https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/vice-president-kamala-harris-vinyl-records-haul-1235325660/
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She went to high school at Westmount in Montreal -- I guess she might count as relatively 'black' (maybe even 'poor'!) in that crowd, but 'rootless intellectual' is probably a better description.
I think she's somewhat estranged with her dad actually? He issued her a public spanking for leaning into the stereotype of Jamaicans being heavy pot smokers, anyways.
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