Is Kamala Harris a traditional African American? Does it matter?
When Barack Obama got elected to the White House more than a decade ago as the nation’s first black president, there was plenty of media attention over whether he should be accurately referred to as a traditional African American.
As the product of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother, Obama was obviously of a different racial background compared to the descendants of Africans who were forcibly transported to this country as slaves. But in the end, what difference did it make? Did it really matter?
Well, here we go again a decade later with the same senseless speculation being disseminated about the racial background of 2020 Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris. It seems some Americans have learned little over the past ten years about just how unimportant and nonsensical this kind of discussion is.
Harris is the product of a Tamil Indian mother and a Jamaican father, which like Obama places her outside of the artificial boundaries of what many Americans define as a traditional black American. And this orchestrated displacement has effectively landed both Harris and Obama in the racial category of ‘other’ in the view of some Americans.
My main question and concern here are why we are still doing this to ourselves? The exact racial makeup of an individual has absolutely nothing to do with his or her competence or ability to be a model citizen of this country or even to be President of the United States. So, why do some of us continue to engage in these types of discussions about race and particularly who qualifies to be categorized as a true African American?
Some of us are simply more comfortable wallowing in past conjured complexities of racial disparities and injustices in this country and refuse to move on into a more enlightened present and future. Dwelling on such ridiculous preoccupations from the past keeps us from finally emerging into an America where these types of aberrant perceptions and speculations are extinct.
I also suspect that those who continue to languish in this racial quagmire are mostly older white and black Americans who are perhaps driven by politics and racism on the part of the former and a pathetic but somewhat more understandable feeling of being passed over and marginalized by the latter.
A decade is a long time for us to continue to hang on to these dated concepts and prejudges, especially after eight years under our first black president in a country and world that is fast evolving beyond these racial stereotypes and nuances that are essentially meaningless in today’s fast emerging multicultural environment, in which these types of dated racial issues should not matter at all.
It is past time for us as Americans to be better than this. Let’s move on.