Kamala's Racial Identity Discussion

[NYC Rebel]

What does fighting for civil rights have to do with in house cultural norms specific to ados

That she seems to be confused on btw

Did you REALLY ask “what does fighting for civil rights mean…” in how one: upbringing was shaped in regards to WHOM they saw civil rights fought FOR?

Unbelievable!!

 

[Geordi]

No I meant as far as creation and what’s happening in households culturally

Jamaicans aren’t eating soul food and washing collard greens in tubs. Gtfoh with that shyt

If ados dont wash greens in the bathtub why are you saying she's taking your culture, and she said it was for a party. That sounds like white people's culture.

If you born in the US you are going to eat all kinds of food, not only Jamaican food, stop.

 

[I Really Mean It]

my paternal grandmother is from macon, ga. before he became famous, she used to watch lil richard walking down the dirt road on which her house sat.

for large gatherings, she washed collards in her bathtub. what exactly are we doing here?

 

[NYC Rebel]

my paternal grandmother is from macon, ga. before he became famous, she used to watch lil richard walking down the dirt road on which her house sat.

for large gatherings, she washed collards in her bathtub. what exactly are we doing here?

These dudes are dumb bruh. Lets not sugar coat shyt.

I read someone say basically say so what they saw their fam nit even from here fight for Black civil rights.

And I can guarantee you not a single individual in that person‘s family has taught black academia or wrote a book on it

 

[O.G.B]

She's a politician in America running nationally - she has no incentive to focus on her blackness. Being Black doesn't help you get a bunch of moderate and independent White votes in a general election. That's why Trump and his attack dogs do it. If they convince Americans that she's "faking", they win. And if they keep Americans thinking about her Blackness, they still win.

The only reason it's even being talked about here is that Trump sycophants painting themselves as #bothsiders bring it up constantly rather than talking about Trump's policies vs Kamala's policies. There have been at least 5 different versions of "Kamala isn't Black" threads posted since Friday alone, and three of those are still active today. That's despite there having already been a flurry of those threads in the previous two weeks. These threads are full of ridiculous false claims like saying that she's a Hindu Brahmin, saying that she never claimed Black until 2019 (or some other random date), saying that her father isn't Black, saying her father has Indian ancestry, saying that he said he was proud to be descended from a slaveowner, saying she only grew up in White neighborhoods, saying she didn't grow up around ADOS culture, and so on. So of course people are going to combat outright lies. Have you seen ANY "Kamala is Black!" threads made by her supporters in that same time?

At the end of the day, Kamala Harris is still not of African American lineage as she has claimed & needs to stop lying & masquerading as if she is.

 

[K.O.N.Y]

Breh, she was raised by a Jamaican man until she was 7, but after that her Black experience was primarily ADOS. Her mom had been deep in Black circles for a decade by that time and knew that her daughters would be seen as Black women in America, so she moved into a Black neighborhood, reached out to her close friends in the Black community, and literally surrounded her girls with Black influences for her entire childhood. You're talking like she only experienced a Jamaican/Indian home and didn't have any ADOS cultural influence which isn't remotely true.


“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”


“I grew up in a community where it was an extended family of people who told all of us as children [that] we were young, gifted, and Black."



Senator Kamala Harris often tells the story of her parents’ romance. They were idealistic foreign graduate students who were swept up in the U.S. civil rights movement — a variation of the classic American immigration story of huddled masses welcomed on its shores. That description, however, barely scratches the surface of Berkeley in the early 1960s. The community where they met was a crucible of radical politics, as the trade-union left overlapped with early Black nationalist thinkers.

It brought a wave of Black undergraduates, many the descendants of sharecroppers or enslaved people who had migrated from Texas and Louisiana, into conversation with students from countries that had fought off colonial powers. Members of the study group that drew them together in 1962, known as the Afro American Association, would help build the discipline of Black studies, introduce the holiday of Kwanzaa and establish the Black Panther Party.




[after her parents' divorce]

Into the vacuum stepped Ms. Gopalan Harris’s old friends, connections from the Berkeley study group. She was a single, working mother of two, far from her family. Not until her oldest daughter was in high school could she afford a down payment on her own home, something she desperately wanted, Senator Harris wrote in her memoir. A web of support — from day care, to church, to godparents and piano lessons — radiated out from the Afro American Association.

“Those ties became the village that supported her in rearing the children,” said Ms. Dashiell, the sociology professor who was a member of the discussion group. “I don’t mean financially. They surrounded those children.” Mr. LaBrie introduced Ms. Gopalan Harris to his aunt, Regina Shelton, who ran a day care center in West Berkeley. Mrs. Shelton, who had been born in Louisiana, became a pillar of the young family’s life, eventually renting them an apartment upstairs from the day care center.

....But there was always a snack and a hug at Mrs. Shelton’s. If it got too late, the sleepy children would go to bed at her house, or Mrs. Shelton would send her daughters to tuck them in at home. One of Senator Harris’s favorite stories from childhood is of preparing a batch of lemon squares with salt instead of sugar; Mrs. Shelton, her face puckered, said they were delicious.

On Sunday mornings, Mrs. Shelton would take the girls to the 23rd Avenue Church of God, a Black Baptist church. This, Ms. Porter said, was what Shyamala wanted for them. “She raised them to be Black women,” Ms. Porter said. “Shyamala really wanted them to have both.”

Ms. Dashiell said she was certain that some influence of the study group survived in the Harris children. “The thinking within the association was deep,” she said. “You would look at, what are the underlying causes of the problems that we find ourselves in as Black people? And that is something that would have translated, through these families, to Kamala.”

In the years since, Senator Harris has often reflected that her immigrant mother’s chosen family — Black families one generation removed from the segregated South — powerfully shaped her as a politician. When she took the oath of office to become California’s attorney general, and then a U.S. Senator, she asked to lay her hand on Mrs. Shelton’s Bible. “In office and into the fight,” she wrote in an essay last year, “I carry Mrs. Shelton with me always.”



She was literally surrounded by Black people and most of them were ADOS. Even later after she left that Black neighborhood in Berkeley, her high school was still 40% Black. Her best friend from high school LIVED with her, in her same room, for a full year. And that was before she went off to study at Howard. The idea that she doesn't have ADOS cultural influence is ridiculous. She's socially awkward and doesn't talk well about her personal life (just like many people, politicians or not), but the idea that she grew up in some sort of Indian/Jamaican cultural bubble distant from Black people is nonsense.



Ya'all have created a caricature in your own minds of what her upbringing must have been like instead of actually doing the slightest research to look for the truth.

Did you REALLY ask “what does fighting for civil rights mean…” in how one: upbringing was shaped in regards to WHOM they saw civil rights fought FOR?

Unbelievable!!

You guys thinking any of this substitutes living in an fba/ados home and actually growing up in the culture

 

[TheKongoEmpire]

(1) Black =/= pure African

(2) ADOS aren't pure Africans yet are Black, so that little logic you are using falls flat. And we aren't in South Africa, rather we are in America.

There are few who are 100%, and a lot who are 95%+. Many but not exclusively are Geechee. Some have posted their ancestry results on Reddit.

 

[TheKongoEmpire]

Correct. She is biracial.

Disagree. She clearly has EUROPEAN ancestry via her father. How much? I can't call it but she has all 3.

 

[NYC Rebel]

You guys thinking any of this substitutes living in an fba/ados home and actually growing up in the culture

It does. It does. Your response is from someone who has no clue about what it took for people to leave their home. Countries come here and join the struggle here understanding that the struggle here was also their struggle back home. You have no clue what the fukk that meant. I say this as a child of someone who understood that and knew what it was to live under colonial rule. It’s a damn shame because you are more interested in responding than learning.


You are saying that simply living within a subculture of black culture that means more than those fighting for the protection of those within those cultures. It’s disgusting. They have to be looked at sideways because of your own ignorance

 

[ChatGPT-5]

Disagree. She clearly has EUROPEAN ancestry via her father. How much? I can't call it but she has all 3.

aka not black. but has black in her.

 

[Tair]

I’m in agreement breh

All parties need to leave the “black” “blackness” thing alone. Democrat-Americans and Kamala herself Just need to focus on policies and the fact she would be better than trump

Kamala panders to fba/ados specific ,cultural references. It’s not just “blackness” something she’s not a part of, which is why she keeps fumbling the ball on them. Just leave it alone

A good portion of people questioning her “blackness” are really pointing towards fba/ados, it’s just an articulation issue. For many that equals black

People need to articulate it better and stop using the "black" term then. Just use lineage specific terms and the debate wouldn't get past 5 messages.

 

[the bossman]

aka not black. but has black in her.

Weird take. Nobody says Faith Evans has black in her or Amerie or Sade have black in them. They're referred to as black artists

 

[K.O.N.Y]

It does. It does. Your response is from someone who has no clue about what it took for people to leave their home. Countries come here and join the struggle here understanding that the struggle here was also their struggle back home. You have no clue what the fukk that meant. I say this as a child of someone who understood that and knew what it was to live under colonial rule. It’s a damn shame because you are more interested in responding than learning.


You are saying that simply living within a subculture of black culture that means more than those fighting for the protection of those within those cultures. It’s disgusting. They have to be looked at sideways because of your own ignorance

I’m not sure what this has to do with my post

A person absorbing a culture that’s not theirs through secondary/third party sources is not the same as someone who is from and grew up in the culture. That’s not even up for debate

 

[K.O.N.Y]

People need to articulate it better and stop using the "black" term then. Just use lineage specific terms and the debate wouldn't get past 5 messages.

I agree

But for many in pop culture black= fba/ados. Even to many non fba blacks

 

[K.O.N.Y]

I'm a server, so I dont really need to crack any books open. They are embedded.


I'm not disagreeing with anything you wrote. ADOS are black people , but a biracial, imo, is not an ADOS, they have ADOS in them, but they are not ADOS. an ADOS is someone with 2 black parents, regardless of admixtures. See thread title again, and the many others you will read in the coming weeks, they are all written by ADOS.

History governs the deal here. And historically they have been. And this is in and OUT of the one drop rule aswell. It’s not just a matter of opinion