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Steelmanning the Strawman: Trump Has A Point About Kamala
OR
Bill DeBlasio is Blacker than Kamala Harris
TLDR: Trump’s attacks against Kamala, while characteristically garbling a more logical point, get at a deeper truth: why should black Americans (or anyone else) vote for Kamala as a Black Candidate when her experience of blackness (inasmuch as such a thing exists) is atypical? This demonstrates how progressive racialists lack a cohesive philosophy of why diversity is good, and who qualifies for diversity points and why.
Trump’s instantly infamous remarks* at the NABJ conference have been universally decried and only sporadically defended. As is typical, Trump has made a mush of a very incisive argument: when progressives tell us that Kamala Harris is an historic candidate for being a black woman, what does that mean? When they say, or at least imply, that Kamala Harris’ Blackness gives us a reason to vote for her, what are those reasons and why should we care about them?
To be clear, Kamala Harris is of course, literally half black and has never hidden that fact or pretended otherwise to my knowledge. She had a Jamaican black father, an Indian mother, attended Howard University (the premier Historically Black College), where she joined a black sorority. We can’t rule out that she lied about her race in some small way at some small point, perhaps lied to somebody in high school, or misreported her race on some official documents where she thought it might benefit her. But let’s compare her to another Democratic politician who traded on a questionable claim to blackness, one who I think was very briefly her competitor in the 2020 presidential primary:
Bill Deblasio is Blacker than Kamala
Kamala starts the comparison with a significant lead, on DNA and her Howard degree and whatnot. But let’s consider some other metrics! Bill has more black kids than Kamala does. Bill has more black spouses than Kamala does. Bill’s immediate family (prior to his divorce anyway, but we’ll ignore that for the exercise) had more black people in it than Kamala’s. Kamala hasn’t had a close relationship with her black father in decades, leaving only her sister; Bill had a black wife and black kids. Even if we expand a bit to give Kamala credit for her brother in law and nieces and nephews, Bill pulls away further: his wife had three siblings who probably also had some kids. Bill DeBlasio had more black loved ones than Kamala has now.
That may seem meaningless, but think about how black advocacy groups construct the idea of a leader being “one of [us]” as an important factor. Barack Obama said Trayvon Martin would have looked like his son. Bill DeBlasio could say that. Kamala Harris can’t. In all honesty, many of my friends have talked to me about “the talk” that their parents had with them, that cops would not treat them well and shouldn’t be trusted. Bill had that talk with his son, Kamala never has. When you hear about hate crimes on the news (let’s assume they’re a real fear ad argumentum) Bill would be worried about his wife and his kids, Kamala wouldn’t be worried about the Emhoffs or her mother.
So if DEI, in the sense that its important to put Black Women in charge, is about experiences, then DeBlasio should get more points than Kamala in some ways. But clearly he doesn’t, and no one would say he does. So what does it mean? It’s not in the blood, because no one would say that Harris or Obama before her are less black than Clarence Thomas. So it’s a minimum blood quantum, the one drop rule, but then after that nothing else matters. Which is either a silly way to insist that I make judgments about our country’s leadership, or an offensive one. Silly, because there’s no logical connection between the one drop rule and leadership if we don’t consider anything else, not experiences or percentages. If it's a DNA trait, we should see some who have more and some who have less. Offensive, because if the theory is that leadership is tied to non-Yakubian blood, then they should say that out loud, that this is a racial hierarchy. This dilemma becomes immediately apparent once we strip away the idea of questioning one’s experiences.
The question that Donald Trump is brave enough to ask, even if everyone else is too PC, isn’t “Is Kamala Harris Black?” It is, why should we care? If diversity is good, we should be able to measure its effects, and when it appears and when it doesn’t. I don’t know that Kamala ever lied about her heritage or altered her history. But she has certainly chosen to emphasize one aspect of her heritage where it offered her political advantages dating back quite a while. I’ve heard a hundred times that she grew up in Oakland, never that she spent a lot of time in Canada growing up. I’ve heard a lot about how she identifies with her distant father, little about the mother that raised her. And that just strikes me as, for lack of a better word, corny. I don’t like being told who to vote for based on race, but if you’re going to do it, then it becomes a political question that can be discussed, and it isn’t offensive to bring it up.
If only we could be having that discussion instead of a birther rehash.
*For what it’s worth, here’s how I would script an answer the question asked:
Idk, just playing Sorkin, I’m sure Trump is better at this than me.
Yep, fully agree with all of this. It's infuriating how leftists have spent decades educating us about how "race is a social construct," celebrating the rich culture of African-Americans, teaching us not to appropriate their culture, and inventing new racial/cultural groups like ADOS and BIPOC to emphasize that being black isn't just a box you check on a form...
Until we get to Kamala Harris. when, apparently, it is. We have always been at war with East Asia!
Hell, it was only a few weeks ago that her supporters were proudly calling themselves "coconut-pilled." I thought it was odd they were so boldly using a racial slur for her, but I guess they wanted to reclaim it? I mean, she's the child of an Indian biologist and a mixed-race Jamaican economist. She was hardly growing up in the mean streets of Oakland- they were always moving from one university to another, and eventually landed in Montreal, pretty much the whitest city in North America. She's like the perfect example of an Oreo/Coconut. White people love Harris because she makes Obama look like Malcom X
Which, you know, is fine. People are influenced by their culture. Harris acts and talks like a white acadamecian because that's the environment she grew up in, and there's nothing wrong with that. But it is, however, deeply "weird" to see her suddenly flip and pretend like she's a true-blue, urban, southern, ADOS black sista, in a cynical ploy to try and grab the kind of black voter support that Obama got.
For what it's worth, I thought Trump handled it pretty well. As usual you have to take him "seriously, not literally." His exact words were a jumble, but I think everyone understood what he was getting at, and I have to imagine there are quite a few voters out there (including some black voters) who appreciate his blunt honestly on the matter.
This is a version of the coconut tree meme, which references an off-the-cuff remark Kamala Harris made back in 2023:
If they were reclaiming anything, it was owning this unusual and memorable quotation as something positive, not a reference to any sort of coconut-based racial slur (which I'm not familiar with). But in my Harris-negative bubble I've only heard it as an example of her trying to be fake-folksy and coming off as off-putting.
Yeah I know that was the original reference. But when you start to repeat "coconut" or an emoji of a coconut, over and over, with no further context... well, it's hard not to see the racial angle. It doesn't seem like it was a particularly inspiring speech, and no one is quoting the actual contents of it. I don't see why it would have gone viral without also being a little bit edgy as reclaiming the racial slur (which not everyone knows, but should be well-known enough among brown-skinned people who are super into politics).
A coconut is white on the inside... Really not a great thing to meme into existence.
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