President Joe Biden suspended his reelection marketing campaign on July 21 and nearly instantly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor for the highest spot on the ticket. The grassroots response has been significantly electrical. That night time, #WinWithBlackWomen kicked off what turned an incredible sequence of Zoom calls paired with on-line fundraising. There have been large calls uniting so many teams—Black Males, white males, Asian People and Pacific Islanders, white girls, South Asians, Native People, LBGTQ+ teams, cat women (with and with out kids), and so many extra—across the former prosecutor, legal professional basic, and senator from California.
One of many newest teams beginning to arrange? Caribbean People.
Harris identifies as each Black and South Asian. Her father, scholar Donald J. Harris, is a Jamaican immigrant and naturalized U.S. citizen, making Harris one of many greater than 3 million People of Caribbean-West Indian heritage. The most important group are Jamaican People, with the biggest communities in South Florida and the New York Metropolis metropolitan space.
And Caribbean girls, like Shirley Chisholm, have lengthy performed a key function in our political historical past, and others proceed to take action in all areas—from making legal guidelines to overlaying them.
Caribbean Issues is a weekly sequence from Day by day Kos. If you’re unfamiliar with the area, take a look at Caribbean Issues: Attending to know the nations of the Caribbean.
It got here as no shock once I noticed a submit on X, previously Twitter, about one of many newest teams to mobilize across the Harris marketing campaign, who’re organizing Thursday’s name.
Thursday’s rally for Harris is hosted by Vote Caribbean, “a 501(c)(3) non-partisan, non profit based community of mission-critical advocates, political operatives, community leaders, Obama alumni and volunteers of Caribbean-American heritage who seek to build a Caribbean-American political and advocacy power base by fostering and advancing greater strategic initiatives & programming within the fabric of American civil society.” Shuttered after the 2021 U.S. Senate runoff in Georgia, Vote Caribbean is again in 2024 and decided to rally the neighborhood round Harris.
Already, there was quite a lot of pleasure from the Jamaican diaspora about Harris’ marketing campaign—particularly her historical past of look after the area. As vp, Harris has held main conferences with Caribbean leaders.
RELATED STORY: Caribbean Issues: Celebrating Nationwide Caribbean Heritage Month and cultural ties to the U.S.
Harris spoke of her Jamaican heritage when she met with Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness in a gathering in March 2022.
RELATED STORY: Caribbean Issues: VP Harris visits the Bahamas to satisfy with Caribbean leaders
Web trolls and hate teams have already challenged Harris’ “Blackness,” spewing epic stupidiy in efforts to alienate Black voters in opposition to her. Their arguments often boil all the way down to “she’s not Black, she’s Asian, or “she’s not Black, she’s Jamaican.”
Fact is, she’s each. Interval.
Samantha Putterman, a workers fact-checker for PolitiFact, writes for Poynter in regards to the confusion round Harris’ identification:
The African diaspora refers back to the many communities of individuals of African descent dispersed all through the world on account of historic actions, each voluntary and involuntary.
Throughout the more-than-400-years-long trans-Atlantic slave commerce, an estimated 15 million African males, girls and kids have been kidnapped from their homelands, compelled into ships, and compelled to endure a weekslong journey in crowded. filthy situations earlier than being bought into enslavement. The slave commerce took thousands and thousands of individuals to completely different areas all through the Americas and the Caribbean.
In a 2020 op-ed, New York Occasions columnist Jamelle Bouie described how Jamaica was house to a brutal and violent plantation system and was a pivotal level within the slave commerce.
Putterman then quotes Bouie:
“Many Jamaicans trace their origins directly to slavery and the mass importation of African captives,” Bouie wrote. “Based on a genealogical account by her father, there is a strong chance Kamala Harris is one of them. What’s more, many descendants of enslaved people in the Americas have European ancestry on account of the pervasive sexual violence whites perpetuated wherever slavery took root.”
There’s additionally the fitting’s “she’s descended from a slaveholder” assault. It relates on to the sexual violence perpetrated in opposition to enslaved folks—particularly girls. Media Issues for America writers Helena Hind and Jane Lee have compiled a protracted record of the spurious assaults:
Proper-wing media — together with the New York Put up and figures corresponding to Sean Hannity — are rehashing previous assaults on Kamala Harris’ ethnicity by mentioning her reported relation to a slave proprietor in Jamaica. Since Harris introduced her candidacy for president, right-wing media figures have absurdly used Harris’ lineage to name her ethnicity into query, with one accusing her of “pretend[ing] to be Black.”
[…]
Proper-wing media launched new assaults after Harris introduced her 2024 candidacy.
MAGA radio host Michael Savage urged host Greg Kelly to deal with Harris’ ancestry as a line of assault. “Everyone swept it under the rug. You should get that for your show on Monday. Her own father said, ‘Kamala, stop this stuff about slavery. We kept slaves as well.’ People shouldn’t forget that, Greg.” [Newsmax, Huckabee, 7/21/24]
White nationalist streamer Stew Peters wrote, “Kamala Harris pretends to be black but her family owned slaves.” [Twitter/X, 7/23/24; Media Matters, 3/13/23]
Rumble streamer David Freiheit (referred to as VivaFrei) posted: “They are already framing Kamala as the ‘black woman’, even though she’s half Indian, and her Jamaican father admitted to having a family tree going back to *slave owners*.” [Twitter/X, 7/21/24; Media Matters, 4/11/23]
I’m a kind of Black of us with an analogous household tree. My Black great-grandfather is pictured just under. I’m informed he “looked German.”
There are a whole bunch of 1000’s of Black folks with white rapist slaveholders and overseers of their household bushes.
Aug. 1 can be celebrated because the anniversary of the 1834 slavery emancipation in a lot of the formerly-British Caribbean. Harris’ enslaved ancestors could have been freed sooner than Black People within the U.S., however the historical past of breeding farms and brutal therapy of Black Caribbeans is one which we can not ignore.
We’d like to concentrate on this darkish historical past to refute the scurrilous expenses denying and distorting Harris’ Black household heritage—together with these made on Wednesday by the Republican nominee for president.
I’ll be reporting extra on Thursday’s Caribbean American’s for Harris mobilization name within the coming days.
Until then, meet me within the feedback for extra on the assaults on Harris, and for the weekly Caribbean Information Roundup.
