Rachel Scott, an African American correspondent for ABC News, interviewed Donald Trump recently before the National Association of Black Journalists. At an early stage of the interview, Scott asked Trump for his reaction to some of his supporters’ assertions that Kamala Harris was a DEI hire. He responded by telling Scott, “How do you define DEI?”
Scott did not define the words but launched into rant that impugned Trump for attacking “a black woman.” Trump sensibly observed that Kamala Harris has had it both ways. She identifies as one thing and then another when it suits her political convenience. The mainstream media pounced on Trump, however, for his alleged crimes against humanity.
Mary Grabar, Resident Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), remarked that she has seen such racial browbeating before from her own experience. In “Kamala Harris and Nikole Hannah-Jones, Racial Bullies” for the August 13 issue of FrontPage Magazine, Dr. Grabar examines the racial self-identification of Harris and the mixed-race New York Times correspondent Nikole Hannah-Jones, whom Harris said published a “masterpiece” in The 1619 Project.
Indeed, Harris had openly called for the payment of reparations because of slavery during her California Senate campaign in the aftermath of Hannah-Jones’s publication. So far, Harris has proven reluctant to meet the national press. Do not expect the mainstream media, however, to challenge her on the reparations issue.
In truth, many people have more than one racial identity. Shyamala Gopalan Harris, Kamala Harris’s mother, a woman of Madras, Indian, extraction, graduated from Berkeley with an advanced degree in science. Donald Harris, an African American Marxist economist at Stanford, whose Jamaican forbearers once owned slaves, married Shyamala in1963. Donald and Shyamala divorced in the 1970s, and Shyamala took the lead role in raising Kamala.
During the 2020 campaign for the Presidency, Kamala Harris made it seem as though she was a “sharecropper’s daughter having to choose between a school with textbooks and indoor plumbing and one without.” Joe Biden “did what white guys are expected to do in such circumstances: give in.” It is racial gamesmanship, “meant to disqualify anyone who is not in a certain racial category.”
In the antebellum South, more than 3500 free people of color owned slaves. Jamaican free people of color did too, as the ancestors of Donald Harris evidence. Hannah-Jones “ignores the special status that light-skinned blacks held in certain communities in the South, often as wealthy slaveowners themselves. Most egregiously,” maintains Dr. Grabar, “she pushes the false narrative about evil white people kidnapping ‘mommies and daddies’ in her picture book used in classrooms across the country. . . [T]he European slave trade from Africa would have been nigh impossible had African tribal chiefs not raided villages for slaves to sell.”
Rachel Scott, the ABC correspondent, needs a refresher course in the history of race and slavery in the Americas. As the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas stated, slavery had a “remarkable regional diversity that generalizations about the institution from a hemispheric or even global perspective might seem to obscure more than they reveal about the significance of slavery in a particular location.”
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