[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
After Donald Trump was interviewed by Rachel Scott at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, the rewriter of American history, Nikole Hannah-Jones, took time out from her five-year-long promotional tour of her 1619 Project to actually write something for the New York Times, where, according to her byline, she is still employed as a “domestic correspondent . . . covering racial injustice and civil rights.” In the manner typical of her original project published as a special issue of the New York Times Magazine and expanded into a book, Hannah-Jones left out key facts and context in her “news analysis” (as the Times called it).
But Hannah-Jones seemed to ignore the column by fellow New York Times writer Mara Gay, which quoted the three-paragraph prelude to Scott’s question, a list of struggle session charges about Trump’s “false claims” on everything from Nikki Haley to Barack Obama to descriptors about “Black district attorney generals” and “Black journalists,” and accusations about having dinner with a “white supremacist.” Gay did not acknowledge the unfairness of such a litany of accusations but charged, “Rather than answer, Trump launched a personal attack on Scott, calling her ‘rude’ for doing her job. ‘First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,’ he spat at Scott.”
I did not see any spittle flying, but it seems that such journalists all work from the same thesaurus when it comes to Trump. And for them, insinuating questions mean doing their “job.”
Trump, knowing the set-up, turned the question around to Harris’s own switch in racial identity. But the liberal commentariat pounced.
Within minutes after the interview, at 3:28 p.m. a Washington Post post alert went out stating that
Former president Donald Trump said Wednesday that he had been aware of Vice President Harris’s Indian heritage but 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,” Trump added, questioning Harris’s identity during a very combative question-and-answer session. . . .
The updates from a team of reporters came about every ten minutes, quoting all kinds of “experts” on Trump’s evident racism.
Kamala Harris, after all, had been made vice president through the set-up. After she pouted about Joe Biden’s stance against school busing, presenting herself as one of those children (in “pigtails”) benefiting from the program—as if she had been a sharecropper’s daughter having to choose between a school with textbooks and indoor plumbing and one without—Biden did what white guys are expected to do in such circumstances: give in.
I experienced something similar when I phoned in my testimony to the Michigan legislature as they were debating a law to forbid the use of The 1619 Project in schools. Using the research I had done for my book, Debunking The 1619 Project, I pointed out the historical falsehoods. A member of the legislature came on the line during the question-and-answer session, prefacing her remarks with, “You may not know this, but I am black”—as if this made a difference when it came to the historical accuracy of classroom materials. It’s a version of “Do you know who I am?” It’s meant to disqualify anyone who is not in a certain racial category.
Trump challenged the set-up by bringing up an inconvenient truth from Harris’s past when she had appealed to Indian political donors. In support, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy accused Harris of “leaning into her Indian heritage when it was convenient for her in California.” Similarly, law professor David Bernstein, author of a book that criticizes racial classification, explained that Harris’s financial support early in her career came from a “network of Asian Indian donors,” which she later did not need. This is just politics, Bernstein explained. However, shortly after the interview he seemed to go into panic mode and posted,
Given Trump’s remarks today, it’s an unfortunate coincidence that I posted something yesterday noting that Harris once emphasized her Indian heritage more. So just to formally disassociate myself from Trump’s remarks, no I do NOT think that Harris is faking a black identity, and the fact that she once gave more public attention to the Indian part of her heritage as part of her political persona does NOT mean that she is insincere in also having a black identity.
He tweeted that it was “quite silly and offensive to say she can’t identify with both her black and Indian heritage.” Harris, indeed, has emphasized her Indian heritage, appearing on a show about Indian cooking and presenting herself as the daughter of immigrants (though a cancer researcher and a Stanford professor of economics are hardly the “huddled masses” of yore).
Harris, whose campaign features such groups as “White Dudes for Harris,” “White Women for Harris,” and “Win With Black Men,” accused Trump of putting “the same old show” of “divisiveness and disrespect.”
The morning after Trump’s interview came a Washington Post top-trending article in politics headlined, “Trump’s attack on Harris’s racial identity moves contest into new phase” and a New York Times “news analysis” article, “Trump Remarks on Harris Evoke a Haunting and Unsettling History.” Journalists have been busy copying and pasting charges from 2016 and the “haunting and unsettling history” of Jim Crow.
Right in line with all this came Hannah-Jones’ “analysis” which also ignored Harris’s previous identification and seemed to negate Bernstein’s point about embracing more than one identity.
She went on at length to describe her own experience as a biracial child when she was classified by virtue of her father being black, regardless of her mother being white. I have no doubt about that.
But she is inconsistent in applying her own experience to Kamala Harris’s which is not as the daughter of a white parent and a black parent, but as the daughter of a brown parent and a black parent—that is if we go by Hannah Jones’ own hierarchy of racial classification as described in The 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones credits blacks alone for civil rights advances (against only white oppressors) that changed immigration law in 1965, writing, “Because of Black Americans, Black and brown immigrants from across the globe are able to come to the United States. . . .” In Hannah-Jones’ simplified narrative, only white people are oppressors.
While Hannah-Jones writes poignantly about her black grandmother making the migration from Mississippi and her uncles’ swollen hands from working in an Iowa meat-packing factory, Harris’s experience is hardly in the same category. Harris’s father’s family, from Jamaica, is far removed from a Mississippi sharecropper. Jamaica has a three-tiered racial classification system, with mixed race, slave-owning Jamaicans included in the upper class. In fact, Donald Harris criticized his daughter’s attempts to identify with American blacks, for example, by admitting to smoking pot (because, presumably, that is what all Jamaicans do too). Her attempt at a Southern black drawl came out sounding like a white South Carolina plantation owner.
As for the 1619 Project, Harris called it a “masterpiece” and tweeted, “We must speak this truth: the very foundation of our country was built on the backs of enslaved people”—as if her own ancestors were enslaved. As Senator and as presidential candidate, Harris has been a proponent of reparations, the cause behind The 1619 Project.
And while Hannah-Jones goes back far in history to bring up miscegenation laws, she ignores the special status that light-skinned blacks held in certain communities in the South, often as wealthy slaveowners themselves. Most egregiously she pushes the false narrative about evil white people kidnapping “mommies and daddies” in her picture book used in classrooms across the country. As I point out in my book, the European slave trade from Africa would have been nigh impossible had African tribal chiefs not raided villages for slaves to sell. Hannah-Jones who has publicly admitted knowing these facts blocked me on Twitter when I brought it up.
Ignoring all these realities, Hannah-Jones falsely charged Trump with “suggesting that there was something nefarious or politically contrived about a mixed-race person claiming Blackness as her identity.” She huffed that the choice had “been made for Harris when she was born to a Black father.” The “orchestrated amnesia” went back to Barack Obama. “It seems that when a mixed-race Black American appears to be ascending to the pinnacles of American power, some white Americans suddenly forget the race rules that white society created.”
No, she has forgotten the “race rules” that she and her ilk have created: a historically false hierarchy of oppression that they use to try to bully white candidates into capitulation or silence.