The idea of reparations for the descendants of slaves has become respectable across a wide swath of the Democratic Party and its top tier Democratic candidates. This past February, Kamala Harris talked around the issue when asked directly about it by Natasha Alford (interview excerpt here). Harris didn’t express support for targeted payments to “black people,” but she couldn’t bring herself to say that she opposed them either.
By April, answering questions posed by Democratic racial hustler Al Sharpton, she promised to sign a bill (H.R. 40) backing a study of reparations (see interview excerpt here). Harris’s promise to Sharpton was followed by a long giggle. What was this woman laughing about? Perhaps she was laughing at her own naked racial pandering to Sharpton and his crowd.
Well, this is actually funny: “Kamala Harris’s Ancestors Owned Slaves, Her Father Says.” Assuming it’s not too good to be true, think what Joe Biden might be able to do with it. The Washington Free Beacon’s Brent Scher reports (links omitted):
Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) is the descendant of an Irishman who owned a slave plantation in Jamaica, according to her father’s lengthy ancestral summary of his side of the family.
Donald Harris, a Stanford University economics professor, revealed in 2018 that his grandmother was a descendant of Hamilton Brown, the namesake of Brown’s Town in northern Jamaica.
“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),” he wrote in a post for Jamaica Global.
Hamilton Brown built the town’s local Anglican Church, which is where Prof. Harris says his grandfather is buried. It is also where he himself was baptized and confirmed.
A research archive of Jamaican records indicate that at one point in 1817, Hamilton Brown owned scores of slaves. The majority were brought in from Africa, though he also owned many Creole slaves.
Scher adds: “The Harris campaign has not commented on her father’s claims. It did not respond to a request for comment.” The voluble Senator Harris will undoubtedly have something to say about it before too long — she won’t follow Mitch McConnell’s lead — but we can enjoy it in the meantime and perhaps even use it to think through the case against reparations.
NOTE: On Sharpton, see Jay Nordlinger’s outstanding 2000 NR profile “Al Sharpton: Power Dem.”
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