Black Voters Say “NO WAY!” to Kamala Harris as VP Pick
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The message is simple: If you’re going to play the identity politics game, you’d better at least do it right. That’s the takeaway with a new Rasmussen poll showing that black voters are rejecting Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick, Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who was chosen precisely because she’s female and “of color.”

But the Democrats’ crucial black voting bloc apparently sees Harris in dark colors, though she certainly has her fans. Rasmussen reports on the latter, writing that the “latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 76% of Likely Democratic Voters have a favorable impression of Harris, including 48% who have a Very Favorable impression.”

“Just 18% of Democrats have an unfavorable view of California’s former attorney general, with 11% who say Very Unfavorable,” Rasmussen continues. “Among all voters, nearly half (49%) view Harris favorably and 44% view her unfavorable [sic], with 28% who say Very Favorable and 33% who say Very Unfavorable.”

The real eye-opener, however, was black voters’ response to the Rasmussen survey: They “said they were one third LESS likely to vote for the Democratic Party ticket because of the Harris pick,” related the National Pulse Saturday.

Adding perspective, Pulse “Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam explained earlier this week how Harris’s ethnic background does not give her the ability to call herself ‘African-American’ in the strictest sense,” the site also told us. “While the media will continue to portray Harris as African-American, it’s important to note her mother was from India, and her father from Jamaica,” Kassam wrote.

“That’s not typically what people think of when they say “African-American,” he continued. “I’m Indian, for example, and I don’t go around pretending to be black.”

The kicker is that most Indians are classified anthropologically as “Caucasian” (really!). Another irony is that while Harris doesn’t shy away from playing the race card — she even implied during a primary debate that her running mate-to-be was a “racist” — she’s a direct descendant of an Irish-born slave owner named Hamilton Brown, according to her father, Stanford University economics professor Donald Harris.

Of course, we’d be far better off if there were less focus on race. But if we are going to discuss it, or anything else, it should be done with rationality and precision. And the precise reality is this: Kamala Harris is not black.

While I’m not the biggest fan of golfing great Tiger Woods, I always respected how he classified himself when asked about his heritage. I’m “Cablinasian,” he’d say, using a term he originated as a child to describe his entire background: Caucasian, black, (American) Indian, and Asian. It’s refreshing honesty.

In contrast, many Americans — and virtually the entire Left — embrace the old “one drop rule,” which liberals once might have called “racist.” Anthropologists call this “the ‘hypo-descent rule,’” informs PBS’s Frontline, “meaning that racially mixed persons are assigned the status of the subordinate group.”

This raises a question: What, then, is the subordinate group in Harris’s case? Are black Americans “subordinate” to Indian-descent Americans, according to the Left’s identity-politics hierarchy?

Then again, if we’re going down this road, we must note that with an Irish ancestor and (Caucasian) Indian mother, Harris would be majority Caucasian herself. So what is she, really? That’s easy.  

Mean and phony.

Whatever Harris’s race, she’s 100 percent pure, unadulterated power-hungry, poll-driven politician — and she’ll step over dead bodies to succeed.

Thus did Harris sleep her way to the middle as mistress of married, then-speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown (cultural affirmative action took her the rest of the way). Thus did prosecutor Harris withhold DNA evidence that could have freed a man from death row until the courts forced her hand. And thus did she, in the Late Show interview clip below, explain away her primary debate condemnations of Biden as just, to translate her words, expedient lies.

 

 

Even Democrat primary voters, white and black, sensed Harris’s lack of “authenticity,” as Politico euphemistically put it last December. This is why her presidential run faltered, is one reason more blacks supported Biden than her, and is why she was polling fourth (at eight percent) last October in California. She exited the race shortly afterwards, sparing herself the humiliation of losing her home state.

So it’s hard to see what Harris brings to the Democrat ticket. Presidential candidates would often choose a running mate from a swing state they needed to win, but even if the senator could deliver a state, California is a lock for the Democrats, anyway.

Then there’s Harris’s checkered past as a cutthroat political operator, her phoniness, and her lack of likeability. To top it off, the billing of her as “African-American” falls flat, and she’s alienating black voters.

What Harris can do, as she proved against Biden, is shamelessly play the race card — and now she’ll have the media’s help. We see this already, too, with Fox Host Tucker Carlson smeared for mispronouncing her name “kāma-la” (it’s “comma-la”). Never mind that Biden himself (and other “racist” Democrats) mispronounced it likewise, as the video below evidences.

In fairness, I’d also mispronounced Harris’s name; I’d say “kă-mala.” But does it really matter? Any which way you say her name, it sounds the same: like bad news for America — and maybe for Democrat ambitions, too.

Photo: AP Images

Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.