Kamala Harris

Source: Bigstock

About three decades ago, California political legend Willie Brown introduced Donald Trump to his latest mistress, Kamala Harris, when Trump gave Willie and his entourage a lift on his jet so he could ask advice from the expert himself on how to get around California’s notorious regulators on a hotel deal he was pondering. It appears that Trump made the not-unreasonable snap judgment that Willie’s nice-looking young beige woman of indeterminate ethnicity with the Hindu first name must be a South Asian.

Years later, when Trump would see headlines celebrating Kamala as the “first black woman” this or that, he didn’t wonder what the full story must be and how he’d gotten it not quite right. (Kamala’s racial ancestry is half Tamil Brahmin on her Indian mother’s side, while on her middle-class mulatto Jamaican father’s side she is roughly one-quarter white and one-quarter black. Her Stanford professor father is the kind of person who is referred to as “black” in America and “white” in Jamaica.)

Instead, Trump being Trump, he seems to have assumed that his memory was, of course, perfect and therefore she must be pulling a fast one.

Hence, Trump recently told a black journalists’ convention about his new opponent:

So, uh, I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much. And she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now, she wants to be known as black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a black person.

Obviously, Trump was wrong: Kamala has always identified as both Asian Indian and black. For instance, she used her claim to blackness to get into Hastings law school via affirmative action.

Of course, Trump’s bumptious accusation was greeted with shrieks of “racism” from part-black women journalists like Nikole Hannah-Jones, the daughter of a white woman, who owe their jobs to DEI favoritism distributed based on the One Drop Rule under which their claims to the professional privileges of blackness are considered as indisputable as, say, Michelle Obama’s.

Hannah-Jones pointed out in The New York Times that not long after 1619, white America adopted the One Drop Rule, so therefore, nothing could possibly ever be done about the injustice of Kamala (and herself) benefiting from being considered black; after all, it’s not like blacks have had any say in American racial policy over the past two generations.

In reality, of course, the historic African American nation is strikingly homogeneous…except for its elite, which tends to be more white by nature and nurture and/or more foreign black, like Obama. Or in the case of Kamala, so foreign black elite and foreign nonblack elite that none of her ancestors arrived in America until about 65 years ago.

Since the 1960s, the black elite has had plenty of time to do something about the One Drop Rule.

But they haven’t.

Why not?

The obvious explanation is that they like the One Drop Rule.

Many black elites only qualify for affirmative action under it. If the average African American is about 80 percent black, what percentage of the latest generation of black elites would reach that percentage (especially if you exclude educated immigrant ancestry)?

Further, extending affirmative action to all who claim the privileges of blackness is a winning political strategy because there is, at present, no finite limit to what whites are expected to sacrifice. Thus, the more nominal blacks the merrier.

In contrast, American Indian tribes are restricted to a highly finite single casino each. So we see Amerindians carefully patrolling the boundaries of their race. For example, in 2011, the Cherokee Nation expelled 2,800 of its members for being too black. That left bigger casino checks for the rest.

Meanwhile, Trump’s supporters on Twitter assumed that Trump’s charges must be one of his patented 4-D chess ploys to, I don’t know, win over the black male vote. Or something. Trust the plan.

My theory after forty years of observing Trump is that he’s neither a racist nor a genius. Instead, he’s an extremely self-confident egomaniac with a decent nose for sniffing out when something doesn’t quite smell right about the current orthodoxy. While he lacks the command of facts and the precision of thought to articulate what he’s sensed, most of the hatred he elicits is because, in his ham-handed way, he’s often onto something.

In this case, what Trump has semi-grasped is that Kamala’s coronation is exposing the inherent illogicalities of the post-1960s affirmative action era. At present, few whites like to talk about who qualifies for quotas, but it’s a fascinating subject that will only grow thornier with time.

In his nonliteral way, Trump is raising a question that will become increasingly relevant in a mixed-race America: Despite all the loose talk about white racism, white Americans tend to like black Americans and want to do nice things for them; but as the generations go by, who exactly should qualify for Black Privilege?

After her disastrous performance on the campaign trail in 2019, Kamala only got the veep nod from Joe Biden during the subsequent Summer of George due to her sex and race. Yet, while she’s all woman (indeed, Kamala is a pretty basic sorority girl, which is why her best campaign move so far has been to declare the GOP nominees “weird” and demand they go stand not so close to her), she’s definitely not all black.

A crucial point to note is that Kamala’s candidacy is like Barack Obama’s on several dimensions, only more so. For instance, Obama was half nonblack, while Kamala tops that by being three-quarters nonblack.

If the elites favored by the Democrats for their blackness are proceeding in just half of a generation from half-black in Obama’s case to a quarter-black in Kamala’s, where does this process end? One-eighth black? One-sixteenth? One-thirty-second? One-sixty-fourth?

In his vague way, Trump appears to sense that one issue that might unite the white, black, and red historic nations of America is opposition to ceding rule of the United States to an Obama-Kamala-style global elite ruling class whose claim to power over America is justified by a smidgen of sacred black blood.

This incipient rivalry between the descendants of American slaves and black global elites was brought to national attention in 2004 when two prominent black Harvard professors complained to The New York Times that few of Harvard’s affirmative action beneficiaries were the descendants of four African-American grandparents:

While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard’s undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard’s African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them—perhaps as many as two-thirds—were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.

They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.

But a few months later at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama—the son of a white woman and a Kenyan, who was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii with zero exposure to Jim Crow—emerged as the future of the Democratic Party. So the press shut up about the growing rift between descendants of American slaves and their generally more cosmopolitan and more talented leadership class.

As you may recall, African Americans tended to be lukewarm toward the ethnically exotic Obama until corn-fed white Democrats in Iowa endorsed him in early 2008, after which, sensing a winner, they flocked to his banner.

You could argue at the time that the weird things about Obama being the First Black Candidate were a one-off, justified by Obama’s unusual rhetorical talent.

But now the Democrats have nominated a second black candidate, the First Black Woman Candidate, who is just like Obama in having zero ancestral ties to the historic African American people, and who was also raised by the nonblack side of the family, partly in a foreign country. It’s almost like the Democrats don’t trust their most devoted voters with power.

And Kamala’s the opposite of Obama in not possessing oratorical skills. While Obama was constantly praised by the press for the supposed virtue of being “comfortable in his own skin,” Kamala is obviously painfully insecure, letting loose her trademark cackle whenever she says anything cringe, which is frequently.

Advocates of Kamala’s claim to authentic blackness point out that she is a fanatical old girl of her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha at Howard U., the first black sorority in the country. What they don’t mention is that Howard’s AKA was perhaps the most notorious practitioner of the “paper bag” test for determining if would-be pledges were fair enough for admittance, and that Kamala’s ambiguously beige looks were ideal for them.

In his lowbrow way, Trump appears to vaguely sense what intellectuals don’t want to talk about: that there is an increasing ethnic gap between the African American masses and their elites, who remain steadfast Democrats. When it was the decrepit Biden vs. the masculine Trump, it seemed plausible that Trump could even lure a sizable fraction of black men away from the Democrats.

But, I suspect, despite Kamala’s numerous flaws, her quarter-blackness will be enough to activate racial solidarity among black voters.

We shall see.