November 23, 2020, 6:40 am
Iowa Congressman Steve King caused a stir on Sunday after asking Vice President-elect Kamala Harris via Twitter if she’s “descended from slaves or slave owners.”
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King is well known for his long history of racist, insensitive, and incendiary remarks, complaining last year that the term “white supremacist” has somehow “become offensive.” It’s likely at least partly due to this that the Republican politician lost his bid for reelection to the House of Representatives earlier this month.
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But that clearly isn’t stopping him from stirring up controversy, or taking bizarre swings at Harris.
“I’m reading that @KamalaHarris made history as first woman, first black woman, first Asian woman, etc = a boatload of intersectionality points,” he wrote. “But Kamala, are you descended from slaves or slave owners?”
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Setting aside his condescending dismissal of how important it is for people to be represented at all levels of government as mere “intersectionality points,” King is referring a viral Facebook post from earlier this year that refers to Harris as “a cop whose family owned slaves in Jamaica.”
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Harris’s father, Donald, publicly claimed that “my roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, a descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town),” referencing a town in Jamaica.
While Brown is on record as a slave-owner in Jamaica, fact-checkers have been unable to verify the genealogical connection between Harris and Brown.
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But even if there is, as Snopes points out, it is very likely that it would make Harris descended from both slave owners and slaves. This, unfortunately, is not an uncommon occurrence, as “it is well-documented that British and Irish slave owners in the Caribbean (and their counterparts in the American colonies) routinely raped and engaged in illicit sex with female slaves, resulting in many ‘illegitimate’ children of mixed racial heritage.”
At the end of the day, this isn’t something King needs to concern himself with, and the fact that he’s out here on Twitter posting it as some kind of “gotcha” to undermine her credibility or her qualifications or whatever it is, exactly, that he thinks this will do, is absurd. And people were ready to tell him as much.
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And a few questioned his own background in response.
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Harris has not responded to the tweet, nor should she give such willful ignorance and insensitivity any attention. So much for there not being any such thing as a stupid question.
*First Published: November 23, 2020, 6:40 am
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