NYT: How dare Trump doubt Kamala!

Those of inferior identities, like Trump, should never question their superiors, like Kamala

Here’s a news article in the New York Times:

Trump Remarks on Harris Evoke a Haunting and Unsettling History

White America has long sought to define racial categories — and who can belong to them.

Since when? Seriously, did white people get asked their opinion about the Biden Administration’s creation of a new racial category for the 2030 Census called Middle Eastern & North African? Did I miss it when Jared Taylor was invited on all the news shows to talk about whether this Flight From White maneuver by the Democrats is Good for the Whites?

Or when South Asians engaged in Flight From White and got themselves reclassified from white/Caucasian on the 1970 Census to Asian on the 1980 Census and thus eligible for cheap loans from the SBA for minority business development and affirmative action in government contracting? I don’t recall anybody asking the opinion of white people at all.

Same for the creation of the Ethnicity category on the 1970 Census, making Hispanics into Schrodinger’s Whites: eligible for racial affirmative action but without having to admit they aren’t totally of 100% blue-blooded Conquistador ancestry.

Was the National Association for the Advancement of White People invited to testify at Congressional hearings on these proposals?

By Lisa Lerer and Maya King

Lisa Lerer reported from New York and Maya King reported from the National Association of Black Journalists’ conference in Chicago.

July 31, 2024

The audience of Black journalists was prepared for a combative exchange well before Donald J. Trump took the stage on Wednesday for an interview at their annual gathering in Chicago.

Yet when Mr. Trump, just minutes in, began questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity, there was an instant ripple of reaction — a low rumble that grew into a roar of disapproval.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, whose mother was Indian American and whose father is Black.

California political legend Willie Brown says that in the the mid-1990s, he introduced his mistress, Kamala Harris, to Donald Trump on a flight they took on Trump’s jet. Willie says he still has the photo of the three of them, although I haven’t seen it online.

Here’s a photo of Trump and Brown (sans Kamala) in 1999 on the set of Suddenly Susan, along with Mr. T (?), Brooke Shields, and Judd Nelson.

Here’s my guess what happened: Trump meets Willie’s girlfriend, this nice-looking young beige woman with long hair (real or fake?) of indeterminate ancestry and wonders what she is. He learns her name is Kamala. Being a worldly man, he recognizes that as Hindu and files her away in his memory as Indian, dot not feather.

Years later, he recognizes her again on TV. Perhaps she is being celebrated as the First Indian-American to Do X.

In that case, that just reconfirms Trump’s initial assumption.

Or perhaps she is being celebrated as the First Black Woman to Do Y.

In cases like that where my recollection of facts is challenged by new information, I try to look up what exactly the full story is. If it turns out my memory was wrong, or less than precise, I try to figure out where my thought process went wrong, so I can do better next time.

I suspect, however, that Trump does not react the way I do.

I presume that when that happens to Trump, he figures somebody must be pulling a fast one.

The moment was shocking, but for those who have followed Mr. Trump’s divisive language, it was hardly surprising. The former president has a history of using race to pit groups of Americans against one another, amplifying a strain of racial politics that has risen as a generation of Black politicians has ascended.

In contrast to, say, the New York Times, which never ever writes about how Karens manifest White Privilege so it’s time for a Racial Reckoning against White Supremacy.

The audacity of Mr. Trump, a white man, questioning how much a Black woman truly belongs to Black America was particularly incendiary.

The audacity! Know your place, white man! Never question your racial betters.

And it evoked an ugly history in this country, in which white America has often declared the racial categories that define citizens, and sought to determine who gets to call themselves what….

This is a fine example of contemporary antiquarianism about race. Whites qua whites have had zero influence on the definition of racial categories since World War II. For example, the League of United Latin American Citizens got the government to not have a separate Latin category on the 1950 and 1960 Censuses, but instead to lump Hispanics in with whites. But then in the 1960s, along came affirmative action so the Nixon Administration came up with the concept of Ethnicity as a special favor to Latinos but to nobody else, all of whom were lumped together as Non-Hispanic.

But who can remember the last few generations of racial policy in the U.S. To most NYT subscribers, if if it happened since Emmett Till, it’s lost in the mists of the present.

Ms. Harris has embraced her dual racial identities. She has long identified as Black and was shaped by several Black institutions. She graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C., and there joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black sorority. She has spoken extensively about growing up in what she described as a Black community in Berkeley, Calif. …

On Wednesday evening, Ms. Harris responded to Mr. Trump’s comment at an event hosted by one of the nation’s most prominent Black sororities, saying they showed “divisiveness and disrespect.”

Here’s the clean little secret about Kamala: she may seem exotic at first glance: half Tamil Brahmin, half Jamaican mulatto middle class. But in truth, she’s just a very basic old sorority sister.

There’s nothing wrong with being basic. For example, Kamala’s special talent is that she’s a good cook.

In 2019, Donald Trump Jr. shared a social media post from an alt-right personality that falsely claimed Ms. Harris was not Black enough to be discussing the plight of Black Americans during a primary debate.

The tweet’s argument was a common one within the African-American community as the children of foreign academic elites and/or white parents, like Obama and Kamala, come to be elevated over the descendants of American slaves:

“Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves,” Ali Alexander, a member of a right-wing constellation of media personalities, wrote on Twitter. “She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.”

For example, here’s a 2004 New York Times news article on the debate over who deserves affirmative action:

Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?

By Sara Rimer and Karen W. Arenson

June 24, 2004

At the most recent reunion of Harvard University's black alumni, there was lots of pleased talk about the increase in the number of black students at Harvard.

But the celebratory mood was broken in one forum, when some speakers brought up the thorny issue of exactly who those black students were.

While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.

They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.

What concerned the two professors, they said, was that in the high-stakes world of admissions to the most selective colleges -- and with it, entry into the country's inner circles of power, wealth and influence -- African-American students whose families have been in America for generations were being left behind.

''I just want people to be honest enough to talk about it,'' Professor Gates, the Yale-educated son of a West Virginia paper-mill worker, said recently, reiterating the questions he has been raising since the black alumni weekend last fall. ''What are the implications of this?''

But shortly afterwards Harvard Law School grad Barack Obama, half-white and half-Kenyan, with no ancestors who were American slaves, emerged as the Great Black Hope of the Democratic Party, so this kind of controversy was driven from the mainstream media to not confuse the Democrats’ return to the White House in 2008.

Back to the new NYT “news” article:

Like many of Mr. Trump’s more provocative statements, the comments conveyed several unsettling ideas at once, all of them somewhat open to interpretation: He implied Ms. Harris was deceiving voters and selecting an identity for political gain. He suggested to the predominantly Black audience that she was not one of them — and to Indian Americans listening that she abandoned them, an assertion echoed by the onetime Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday. …

And across social media platforms, Trump supporters circulated questions about whether her race was mentioned on her birth certificate — a throwback to the attacks they once leveled against Mr. Obama.

Dr. Donald Harris comes from Jamaica’s mulatto middle class who are not called “black” in Jamaica. I was once talking to a film student from Jamaica who attended an expensive American private college. He laughingly noted that everybody calls him “black” in America and “white” in Jamaica.

Back when he had an Afro, Donald Harris’s black side was obvious:

But now that he’s bald, he’s vaguer looking:

As I wrote in 2020:

Americans, with our traditional one-drop rule for lumping people into either black or white, don’t understand Caribbean and Latin American gradients, which go back to Spanish times. For example, on Kamala’s birth certificate, Professor Harris entered as his race “Jamaican,” which strikes me as a sensible way around the problem of Americans lacking a vocabulary to describe in-between people like himself.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers has an informative chapter about how hard his Jamaican mother’s bourgeois ancestors had to strive when choosing spouses to keep their line light and bright and not recede back into the black masses.

The point of this New York Times news article is that Ms. Harris is a woman, black, Asian, and, most importantly, a Democrat so she has far more Pokemon Point Privilege than an inferior like the male, white, Republican Trump, who should never dare to ask any questions about his superiors.