Kamala Harris is not your ‘meme girl’
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., is looking pretty formidable to Republicans these days. You can tell they’re nervous about her because of the half dozen or so corny memes floating around about her background — none of them true.
In a properly functioning democracy, a meme wouldn’t be much of anything other than something to be skeptical about, but our shortened attention spans mean our politics are increasingly defined by these expertly packaged lies. Unfortunately, if enough people believe them, it doesn’t matter how ridiculous they are.
Ask former Vice President Al Gore. His 2000 presidential bid was hobbled by a meme that, aided by mainstream media legitimacy purposely misconstrued his Senate record and turned him into a self-agandizing “father of the internet.” For Ms. Harris, the memes have taken a familiar path — birtherism and the alleged inauthenticity of her racial background. Ms. Harris was born in Berkeley, Calif., in 1964 to a Tamil Indian mother and Jamaican father.
The fever swamps of the hardright have already concocted a constitutional crisis of what is a fairly straightforward origin story by insisting that because her parents were “foreigners” (i.e., international students), she’s not a real American. Apparently, being born in Berkeley, Calif., only gets you so far before you have to show some additional papers — like Barack Obama should’ve done.
LikeMr.Obama,Ms.Harrisspent somecrucialyearslivingabroadafterherparentsdivorced.SheattendedhighschoolinMontreal,Quebec,wherehermothertaughtat McGillUniversity.Atnopointdid shebecomeaCanadiancitizen,but trytellingthattofolkswhosuspect yetanotherdarkconspiracyfroma firsttermsenatorwithasuspicious religiouspedigree(HinduandBaptist)andamulti-racialbackground.
Ms. Harris attended Howard University, the most famous of the HBCUs in the country, where she asserted her blackness from the beginning.
Still, some talking heads — even at “liberal” MSNBC — have had the temerity to ask whether she’s been “accepted” by the black community as “one of its own.” These clueless opinion-mongers don’t seem to realize that being black isn’t like being subject to a panel determining early admissions to a university.
People forget that Mr. Obama was also dogged by persistent questions of whether he was “black enough” a year before he became president. Some blacks hostile to his candidacy and more than a few white commentators had very fixed notions of what constituted “real blackness” back in 2007 and 2008. Being from Hawaii wasn’t one of them.
Ms. Harris is going through a version of that today. When she was recently asked on a popular hip-hop morning talk program whether she’d ever smoked weed, she admitted that she not only smoked ganja, but had inhaled, joking that half her family was Jamaican.
Because she was interviewed by two hosts, there was a lot of laughter and crosstalk in the studio. While still in the middle of discussing her weed consumption, she was also asked about the kind of hip-hop she listened to back in the day.
Conscious,nodoubt,oftheimportanceoftheCaliforniaprimarytoher electoralplans,shevolunteered SnoopandTupacasherfavorites. Shewasnotindicatingthatshelistenedtoeitherrapperwhileshewas incollegesmokinggrassbecauseneitheroneofthemwasrecordinginthe earlyandmid-80s.Theyenteredthe hip-hopsceneinthe‘90s.
In the early ‘80s, there were no notable West Coast rappers Ms. Harris could’ve repped without getting dragged for it. Of course, Fox News and other right-wing sources made it seem as if she was claiming to have listened to Snoop and Tupac songs that didn’t exist when she was at Howard when she was clearly answering two different questions. This is what happens when Fox reports what black people say.
Consequently, Ms. Harris is being knocked for smoking weed and pandering for street cred to come across as more “authentically black.” For the inattentive who are only skimming headlines at this point, it’s a seed of doubt that could flower into outright skepticism about her character later.
Certainly, there’s enough in Kamala Harris’ record as California’s Attorney General and her current stint as a first-term senator to legitimately question if she’s as progressive as she indicates. Many young, black Democrats hold her record as a law-and-order DA against her.
A fair reading of Ms. Harris’ record indicates she was, at times, a cautious pol who sometimes failed to fight for interests she loudly champions today. At the very least, she’s a work in progress who has demonstrated an ability to listen and learn from her constituents. She adapts with the times and is smart enough to admit it.
In the meantime, the attempt to make Kamala Harris an exotic and thoroughly alien “other” like what was done to Mr. Obama isn’t going to work. She’s too rooted in black communities from D.C. to the Bay area to be easy pickings over cultural issues. The stupid memes unleashed so far aren’t going to work. Because of this, she is likely to be one of the last Democrats standing in 2020.