The ‘Kamala ain’t Black’ conspiracy theory explained

OPINION: If the online debate over Kamala Harris’ Blackness has left you puzzled, don’t worry—we have answers.

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.

Elon Musk is a DEI trailblazer.

For years, Black people have trailed their Caucasian counterparts in the conspiracy theory manufacturing industry. America’s greatest white liars perpetrated the most fantastic frauds, including Drapetomania, Stop the Steal, and — maybe the most magnificent myth ever — white genetic and intellectual superiority. Meanwhile, the best Black Americans could do was the Willie Lynch letter – a speech by a fictional racist white man that was loosely based on real-life violence committed by real-life racists.

To be fair, Black Americans workshopped a few good ideas. For more than 100 years, African Americans, from Aretha Franklin to Malcolm X believed there was a secret government program that used spies and informants to target every Black freedom movement in American history. Older Black folks spread stories that white doctors and the U.S. military intentionally poisoned Black communities. I’ve even heard ludicrous statistics, like how the government sterilized 100,000 Black women in a nationwide eugenics program. Unfortunately, the wildest, most abominable horror stories conceived by Black brains paled in comparison to the things that white people actually did…

Until Elon Musk bought DEI to Black Twitter.

Ever since the renowned corporate colonizer turned his social media company into an online university for courses on white genocide, Jewish space lasers and the woke-mind virus, Black Twitter has been slowly closing the racial conspiracy theory gap. Noted not-microbiologist Dr. Umar Johnson’s theory that the FDA, the Chinese government, and the Rockefellers are responsible for “most viruses” is more diverse than Musk’s claim that COVID-19 was no worse than the common cold. When you’re accustomed to social studies lessons about “happy slaves,” believing slave ships didn’t exist feels like equity. Perhaps the biggest example of inclusion is the small sliver of Black people who have come up with a version of birtherism that is as racist, ridiculous and patently untrue as the search for Barack Obama’s birth certificate:

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Apparently, Kamala Harris is not Black.

I’m not laughing; that’s my asthma acting up!

While it is easy to dismiss this claim by using the age-old method of genetic testing called “eyesight,” theGrio decided to investigate this hilarious hypothesis seriously. Here’s what we found.

What is Black?

To effectively debunk this allegation, we must first agree on what people are saying.

While there are numerous stories and tweets claiming Harris descended from a white slaveowner, those stories just prove people’s ignorance of America’s true history. Slavemasters often raped their human property, which explains an American Journal of Human Genetics study showing the average African American’s genome is nearly a quarter European. Loving vs. Virginia didn’t cause that; the sexual violence of racial terrorism did. As one teenager wrote: “It is fair to remember that almost the total of race mixture in America has come, not at Negro initiative, but by the acts of those very white men who talk loudest of race purity.”

To be fair, what does a 17-year-old kid named Martin Luther King Jr. know about racism?

But the asinine assertions about Harris’ white ancestors look scholarly next to the rumors that Harris’ father, economist Donald J. Harris, is not Black. Some claim he is also of South Asian descent. Others say neither he nor Kamala refers to themselves as Black. Some people are just dumb. Even though Kamala’s dad looks like he has fried his share of whiting, we wanted to investigate.

Actual scientists know that “most individuals who have less than 28% African ancestry identify as European American, rather than as African American.” But, using the one-drop rule – the absurd racial metric codified by white Americans – about 3.5% of the people who identify as white “have at least one percent African ancestry in their DNA.” Others believe self-identification determines one’s Blackness, which technically makes Rachel Dolezal Blacker than Tiger Woods. However, in a country where white perception dictates reality, once white people believe a person is Black, does science, genetics, laws, self-identification or lineage even matter?

Luckily, we don’t have to answer that question. However one defines “Black,” Kamala Harris fits the description.

Although Harris might be the descendant of a slaveowner, both Politifact and genealogist Jim McNiff trace Harris’ lineage to formerly enslaved Jamaicans. Her paternal great-great-great-grandmother was Black. So was her great-great-grandmother. Her great-great-grandfather Patrick Finnegan was described as “a sambo scion of the aforesaid combination of Irish and African races.” His mother’s race is much clearer: “Her color being black,” wrote a Jesuit friar in 1906 (who, for some reason, doesn’t have a Twitter account).

But you don’t have to even go back that far. Kamala’s father, economist and professor Donald J. Harris was described in the Jan. 25, 1974, edition of the Stanford Daily as “Harris, a Black.” A week later, in a letter to the editor, the university’s dean of undergraduate studies, who just happened to organize Stanford’s Black Studies department, referred to Donald J. Harris as the economic department’s “only Black professor.” Stanford sent him packing after he was accused of teaching “radical Marxism.” Even though Stanford treated him like he was Black, Professor Harris was fine with the school’s decision because he wanted to “link up with serious research of Black scholars applying system analysis to problems of Blacks throughout the world.” Dr. Harris is currently listed among the economics department’s emeritus faculty.

Although her dad wrote essays on Black history, spoke at Pan-African events, and took her to meet her Black cousins, he isn’t the only reason Harris refers to herself as Black. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” Harris wrote in her now-bestselling memoir “The Truths We Hold.” “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.” That was before Harris attended a historically Black college and joined a Black sorority.

Case closed.

Why are people saying this?

Some people are not smart.

We should also understand that racial classifications vary from country to country. A study of the Caribbean Commonwealth notes: “Approximately 95 percent of all Jamaicans were of partial or total African descent, including 76 percent black, 15 percent mulatto, and 4 percent either black East Indian or black-Chinese.” In America, all of those groups would just be considered “naysayers.” But, just as there are many people who distinguish between Black Americans and Black immigrants, it is entirely possible that a man from a 95% Black country calls himself “Jamaican” because it describes his heritage more precisely. While it is fair (and important) to acknowledge the cultural, historical and economic differences unique to descendants of America’s race-based, constitutional form of human servitude, confining the idea of Blackness to boundaries originally created by people who don’t wash their legs also means Kamala Harris is not as Black as Tim Scott or Herschel Walker or Candace Owens.

Would you vote for them?

Anyone with Black skin whose feet have touched American soil has more in common with a Keisha from Atlanta than a Karen from Wisconsin. Even if one considers Kamala to be a first-generation Jamaican-South Asian descendant of Irish slaveowners, the people whose entire political party is predicated on the supremacy of whiteness have the same regard for Harris’ heritage as they do for my ancestors, who were enslaved in South Carolina by Irish immigrants who owned plantations in the Caribbean. The people who refer to an elected official who never lost a race as a “DEI candidate” put Michael Harriot, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and every single American of African descent into the same distinct racial category:

Niggers.

In a sense, it doesn’t matter if Kamala Harris is Black. The majority of Black voters have cast their ballot for the Democratic nominee for president in every presidential election since 1936. All but one of those candidates were white. If you don’t think Harris is Black enough, just treat her like Black people treated FDR or JFK or LBJ or all of the white men whose ancestry was never questioned. Why weren’t you pressed when you voted for them?

To be fair, it’s possible that you’re smarter and more politically astute than Mary McLeod Bethune and my grandmother and Stokely Carmichael and most of the Black people who risked their lives to choose a president. Maybe you think it’s perfectly fine to base your politics on a construct that didn’t exist until white people made it up; just acknowledge that you would rather let white people choose the president. Of course, enabling white people to maintain power over people of other races is the literal definition of white supremacy. It’s also interesting to note when the Kamala-ain’t-Black narrative rocketed to the top of the trending topics chart, but that might sound like a Black conspiracy theory. Then again:

White supremacy is the greatest conspiracy theory of all.

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Michael Harriot is a writer, cultural critic and championship-level Spades player. His NY Times bestseller  Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America is available in bookstores everywhere.

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