All right, Harris...Pay up.
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How is Kamala Harris descended from slave owners anyway? I assume we all are, just as I assume we’re all descended from slaves. But which side and how many generations back?
Only non-witches get due process.
- Cotton Mather, Salem Massachusetts, 1692
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Funny how it used to be braggable to be descended from high status folk. Now it's braggable to be descended from low status folk. Because it increases status.
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How is Kamala Harris descended from slave owners anyway? I assume we all are, just as I assume we’re all descended from slaves. But which side and how many generations back?
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How is Kamala Harris descended from slave owners anyway? I assume we all are, just as I assume we’re all descended from slaves. But which side and how many generations back?
@jon-nyc said in All right, Harris...Pay up.:
How is Kamala Harris descended from slave owners anyway? I assume we all are, just as I assume we’re all descended from slaves. But which side and how many generations back?
While she wasn’t Sally Hemmings wasn’t her mother, it’s one way to descended from slave owners.
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Serious question.
Why does this guy say she’s descended from slave owners?
Did he just make that shit up?
@jon-nyc said in All right, Harris...Pay up.:
Serious question.
Why does this guy say she’s descended from slave owners?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kamala-harris-ancestor-slaves/
Amid the renewed scrutiny of Harris’ family history, the right-leaning website “Big League Politics” posted what it said were the names of the “slaves Kamala Harris’ ancestor owned,” adding:
“Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris is descended from Irish slave owner Hamilton Brown, the namesake of Brown’s Town in Jamaica, who recruited massive numbers of Irish migrants to Jamaica to work on his sugar plantations after the British empire abolished slavery.”
The “Red State” website published a similar post, whose headline asked, “When Will Race-Baiting Kamala Harris Acknowledge She is a Descendant of a Slave Owner?”
Similar reports appeared on right-leaning blogs and websites in January and February 2019. All of them were based on an account written by Donald Harris, a retired Stanford University economics professor and the father of Sen. Harris.
On Jan. 13, Jamaica Global, a website for the global Jamaican diaspora, published an article that Prof. Harris had written in September 2018 about his family’s roots in Jamaica. He was born on the island, before immigrating to the United States in the 1960s, to pursue a career as an economist and university lecturer.
While studying for his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, he met Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian cancer researcher. The couple were married, and their daughter, the future California Attorney General and U.S. Senator, was born in Berkeley in 1964. Harris and her sister, Maya, are therefore first-generation American citizens, born in the U.S. to a Jamaican father and Indian mother.
In his Jamaica Global article, Harris claimed to be descended from the 19th-century planter and slave owner Hamilton Brown. He wrote:
“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town) and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me). The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural ‘produce’ exporter (mostly pimento or all-spice), who died in 1939 one year after I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town (and where, as a child, I learned the catechism, was baptized and confirmed, and served as an acolyte).” [Emphasis is added].
There is no doubt that Hamilton Brown was a prominent plantation owner in Jamaica during the first half of the 19th century, owned slaves, and also advocated against the abolition of slavery and sought to downplay the difficult working and living conditions of slaves in Jamaica.
However, we have been unable to verify that a line of descent exists between the modern-day Harris family and the 19th-century slave owner. As such, the claim that an ancestor of Sen. Harris owned slaves in Jamaica remains unproven. If evidence emerges that verifies that line of descent, we will update this fact check accordingly.
Finally, it is worth noting that, even if it is true that the Harris family are descendants of the Antrim slave owner Hamilton Brown, they are also quite likely to be descendants of slaves. It is well-documented that British and Irish slave owners in the Caribbean (and their counterparts in the American colonies) routinely raped and engaged in illicit sex with female slaves, resulting in many “illegitimate” children of mixed racial heritage.
If it is the case, for example, that Christiana Brown was the daughter of Hamilton and Mary Melvina Brown, this means that two of Christiana’s siblings were Mabel Melvina and Edwin Hamilton Brown, both of whom were listed in their baptismal records as “colored,” that is of mixed race (as opposed to “black” or “white,” the other labels used in baptismal records at that time).
This in turn would mean that Hamilton Brown, a man born on the island of Ireland in the late 18th century and a prominent and powerful slave owner, had racially mixed grandchildren, after fathering a daughter (Mary Melvina) with a woman whose name did not appear on the baptismal certificate. Although we don’t have clear proof, that pattern strongly suggests that that particular branch of Brown’s family tree derived just as much from an enslaved woman, whose identity may well be lost to history, as it did from Brown himself.
Even if it is the case that the Harris family, by way of Christiana Brown, are descendants of Hamilton Brown, those who seek to attack or undermine Sen. Harris for the wrongdoing of a man who died almost 200 years ago should first gain a better understanding of the often complicated, traumatic histories of black families in the United States — and tread much more carefully.
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That makes perfect sense. Most ‘heritage’ African Americans (ie not recent immigrants) are descended from slave owners because slave owners raped their slaves. That seems like it would apply to descendants of slaves in the Caribbean as well.
But that seems to fly in the face of this guys claim that she’s not a descendant of slaves.
