No doubt you’ve seen everyone in the media bending over backwards to avoid describing Kamala Harris as a Black woman. Here, for example, is the banner headline no less a media authority than The New York Times ran on Friday, hailing her historic election:
Kamala Harris Makes History as First Woman and Woman of Color as Vice President:
Ms. Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, has risen higher in the country’s leadership than any woman ever before her.
I can’t tell you how much this irritates me. I am mindful, though, that it must irritate her Black AKA sisters – who pledged alongside her at Howard University – a thousand times more.
Frankly, I’ve already admonished the media about this unwitting racial slight too many times to count. My refrain about feeling like John the Baptist comes to mind.
This is why I see no point in venting racial indignation anew. Instead, I shall suffice to share excerpts from two sermons on point, which I delivered just months ago.
- From “I Picked Biden-Harris 2020 in January 2019. Now It’s Official!” August 11, 2020:
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Harris describes herself as a ‘proud Black woman.’ Moreover, there’s no denying that, if she were just an ordinary BLM protester getting arrested for assaulting a police officer, no Caucasian, Indian, or Asian in America would be describing her as a Black Asian American or an anodyne woman of color. And surely nobody in India would be claiming her as one of their own.
So let’s not get her racial identity all twisted. She’s a proud Black-American woman. Just call her that!
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- From “Hail, Naomi! US Open Champion (Again) … and Serena’s Heir,”, September 15, 2020:
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Apropos of being black, like many readers who inquired, you too might be wondering if Naomi identifies as Black – her vanguard support for Black Lives Matter notwithstanding.
Her parents are Black Haitian Leonard Francois and Asian Japanese Tamaki Osaka. This is why she identifies as Black and Asian, which I suppose is one shade of race consciousness above Tiger Woods identifying as Cablanasian. Remember that…?
With respect to both of them, though, you need only query why the most famous bi-racial person in the world never identifies as Black and Caucasian. The reason, of course, is that Barack Obama knows that, from the days of slavery, whites have always treated bi-racial Americans as Black.
It has never mattered if that ‘Black’ looked as white as white can be. More to the point, those bi-racial Blacks had to toil as slaves and suffer the indignities of Jim Crow right alongside their darker brothers and sisters. And, thanks to Trump’s presidency, some whites are doing their damndest to recapture those halcyon days when just one drop of Black blood meant you were as Black as Black can be.
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Given that, can you think of any journalistic reason the media insist on calling Harris a woman of color? This, especially considering that none of them ever called Obama a man of color.
I hope you get why I find this so irritating. Yet I know all too well that my intellectual reasoning is no match for the politically correct reasons both the media and Harris have for this racial pandering:
- It gives 3.5 million Indian Americans a reason to be more engaged in American politics, making them more avid consumers of news. Not to mention that it will also make them as reliable a Democratic voting block as Black Americans have been for over 50 years.
- It gives 1.35 billion Indians in South Asia a vested interest in American politics, making them too more avid consumers of (US) news. Not to mention that it will also make India a more friendly and engaging ally.
All the same, I could not help calling out their blatant hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, having “spotted” her, Indians in South Asia (of all castes) are proudly claiming her as one of their own. This, notwithstanding that the mere fact of being half Black would ordinarily make her an outcast(e).
After all, you’d have to recall the racist caste system of Apartheid South Africa to appreciate the systemic racism that still prevails in India today. Indeed, it’s telling that no less a moral authority than Mahatma Gandhi became indoctrinated with presumptions about Blacks as inferior while working as a young lawyer in South Africa.
To be fair, Gandhi reportedly evolved into a champion of equality for all people. More to the point, India’s caste system has evolved to where it often defies all traditional classifications of birth, color, and profession.
Therefore, even if Kamala were as Black as ebony, I suspect all Indians would still be hailing her as their most favored daughter in the diaspora. Which, of course, must make former Republican governor Nikki Haley of South Carolina feel like, well, a Dalit.
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