I’m not sure if this is worse than her ‘Salt and Pepper” or “Tupac” moments.
Senator Kamala Harris failed badly at pandering to black people, but she’s not even good at pandering to white liberals. And that’s not exactly a tough one.
Senator Kamala Harris started her life’s work young. She laughs from her gut, the way you would with family, as she remembers being wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller with no straps with her parents and her uncle. At some point, she fell from the stroller (few safety regulations existed for children’s equipment back then), and the adults, caught up in the rapture of protest, just kept on marching. By the time they noticed little Kamala was gone and doubled back, she was understandably upset. “My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing,” Harris says, “and she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”
And the girl who made up that story was me.
I never will forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother. “What do you want?” the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered, “Fee-dom.” She couldn’t even pronounce it, but she knew. It was beautiful!
That’s Alex Haley’s Playboy interview with Martin Luther King. At least Kamala is borrowing from the classics.
The incredible inauthenticity of Kamala isn’t news. This comes well after the whole growing up in segregated Berkeley routine. But even Obama didn’t borrow this blatantly from MLK. (Or Haley. With Haley, there’s usually some ambiguity.) Every time Kamala tries to humanize herself, she comes off as more fake than ever.
Leave a Reply