One Drop Ruse
7th August 2024
About three decades ago, California political legend Willie Brown introduced Donald Trump to his latest mistress, Kamala Harris, when Trump gave Willie and his entourage a lift on his jet so he could ask advice from the expert himself on how to get around California’s notorious regulators on a hotel deal he was pondering. It appears that Trump made the not-unreasonable snap judgment that Willie’s nice-looking young beige woman of indeterminate ethnicity with the Hindu first name must be a South Asian.
Years later, when Trump would see headlines celebrating Kamala as the “first black woman” this or that, he didn’t wonder what the full story must be and how he’d gotten it not quite right. (Kamala’s racial ancestry is half Tamil Brahmin on her Indian mother’s side, while on her middle-class mulatto Jamaican father’s side she is roughly one-quarter white and one-quarter black. Her Stanford professor father is the kind of person who is referred to as “black” in America and “white” in Jamaica.)
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Obviously, Trump was wrong: Kamala has always identified as both Asian Indian and black. For instance, she used her claim to blackness to get into Hastings law school via affirmative action.Of course, Trump’s bumptious accusation was greeted with shrieks of “racism” from part-black women journalists like Nikole Hannah-Jones, the daughter of a white woman, who owe their jobs to DEI favoritism distributed based on the One Drop Rule under which their claims to the professional privileges of blackness are considered as indisputable as, say, Michelle Obama’s.