Kamala Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, to a Tamil Indian mother and a Jamaican father.
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a breast cancer scientist who immigrated to the United States from Madras (present-day Chennai) in 1960.
Her father, Donald Harris, is a Stanford University economics professor who emigrated from Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study in economics at University of California, Berkeley.
Recalling the lives of his grandmothers, Donald Harris wrote that one was related to a plantation and slave owner while the other had unknown ancestry.
Looks like most of her coloredness comes from her mother's side.
Anyway, she is not descended from American slaves, or indeed American Negroes, at all.
And it looks like at least some of her ancestors owned slaves.
(As is undoubtedly true of many American blacks, come to that, given that before the Civil War free blacks or even slaves in some states could and did own black slaves, themselves.)
In a 2019 interview, Kamala Harris said, "'I am black and I am proud of it.'"
Harris's family lived in Berkeley, California, where both of her parents attended graduate school.
She was close to her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopalan, an Indian diplomat.
As a child, she often visited her extended family in the Besant Nagar neighborhood of Chennai, Tamil Nadu.
She grew up going to both a black Baptist church and a Hindu temple.[12] She has one younger sister, Maya Harris.
They both sang in a Baptist choir.
Personally, I would say she is an American with an obvious dose of non-white ancestry.
Is she in any shape or form an African-American?
Ali himself admits she is.
People (on the Left and Right) need to stop sharing this picture. This is not her father, Donald Harris, Jr.
Her father is a mix of Afro and white Jamaican.
Her mother is Tamil Indian (upper caste).
Kamala Harris is Indian-Jamaican and a first generation American.
So, less than half African, but truly African in part.
Yet neither she nor her supporters have pointed that out.
So who cares? you might ask.
Why all the fuss?
Well, Ms Harris, her supporters, leading Democrats, and the PC police are all wedded to the claim she is, entirely sans nuance, an African American.
She who so clearly wants and really, really needs to play that race card; and they, who so want her to be able to - though preferably not against other Democrats.
Anyway, "Death to deniers!", say she and they.
"Birther" tweet targets Kamala Harris. 2020 Democrats rushed to her defense.
2020 Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris was the target of a birtherism-like attack — retweeted and then deleted by President Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. — targeting her identity as "not an American Black."
. . . .
Harris was born in Oakland, California to parents who had emigrated to the U.S. from India and Jamaica.
The viral tweet by right-wing personality Ali Alexander — whose Twitter bio claims that he "exposed" Harris and includes the hashtag #NeverKamala — mentioned her parents' background and said
"I'm so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history.The tweet appeared to get the attention of Donald Trump Jr., who has more than three million followers.
"It's disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2? These are my people not her people."
Trump Jr. wrote "Is this true? Wow" on Thursday, but soon deleted it.
A spokesman told The New York Times Trump Jr. was "asking if it was true that Kamala Harris was half-Indian because it's not something he had ever heard before."
Yes, it is true.
But AA was accusing her of being a racial imposter even while admitting her African ancestry, far more substantial (apparently) than Elizabeth Warren's Indian ancestry.
She is more Indian than African, sure.
But still.
If KH were an American with one African grandparent and the other three snow-white Swedes, would she count as African-American?
God, what do we say to that, in an America apparently still wed to the one-drop rule for blackness?
Harris' campaign manager, Lily Adams, said in a statement to CBS News "this is the same type of racist attacks used to attack Barack Obama. It didn't work then and it won't work now."
Harris' husband, Douglas Emhoff, expressed his gratitude on Twitter to those who came to his wife's defense. "...Thx to all the 2020 candidates and everyone else for calling out this crap for what it is"... Emhoff tweeted.
On Saturday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts was the first 2020 candidate to tweet in support of Harris.
"The attacks against @KamalaHarris are racist and ugly. We all have an obligation to speak out and say so. And it's within the power and obligation of tech companies to stop these vile lies dead in their tracks," Warren tweeted.
Pocahontas Warren, American Indian by the tiniest of hairs (and since when is there a one-drop rule for Indian-ness? Is half the NHL Indian?), defends Harris from the accusation of being a racial imposter?
What will the right make of that, eh?
And look at her, calling for the tech companies to collude in suppression of the charge.
A charge Ms. Warren just barely escaped, herself, by proving herself to be a thousandth, or hundred thousandth, or millionth red Indian with a DNA test, to pretty much universal laughter on the right and universal condemnation on the left.
Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey chimed in with a tweet saying "@kamalaharris doesn't have sh[**] to prove."
Strong remarks also came from Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, former U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Biden, the current frontrunner, tweeted on Saturday "The same forces of hatred rooted in 'birtherism' that questioned @BarackObama's American citizenship, and even his racial identity, are now being used against Senator @KamalaHarris.
"It's disgusting and we have to call it out when we see it. Racism has no place in America."
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