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The invention of Obama and Kamala’s ‘blackness’

When it’s convenient, she’s black, when it’s convenient she’s Indian or even Asian, and when convenient she’s something more ambiguous.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

The media is freaking out after former President Trump told black journalists about Kamala, “I’ve known her a long time indirectly — not directly very much — and she was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage. 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 … but you know what, I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t.”

Kamala and Obama were both ‘third culture’ children raised by non-black mothers and abandoned by their black fathers who grew up in third countries (Indonesia for Obama and Canada for Kamala) who had limited connections to any sense of blackness until they moved to America and began working on their careers.

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Kamala at least attended Howard and had tried to socialize with other black people, Obama hardly did.

Both Kamala and Obama had mothers who were non-black radicals with a hankering for black nationalism.

Obama related to blackness mostly through the lens of politics. Kamala likely does too.

A core difference between the invention of Kamala and Obama’s blackness is that Obama launched his national career with a bestselling ‘memoir’ laying out a fictionalized version of his embrace of blackness.

Kamala has really not done so and probably couldn’t. She’s many things but an intellectual, even a fake one, isn’t one of them.

But another difference is that while Obama never formally identified as white (Muslim or Indonesian may be another matter), Kamala did identify as Indian. And still does. The pitch for her tends to go back and forth.

Trump isn’t wrong here, the media is once again uncomfortable with the question of a non-African American ‘black’ candidate whose roots are not American and do not come out of the slavery experience.

That’s also a sensitive issue for many African Americans. Most black Americans did eventually come to accept Obama as one of their own.

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But he was a much better mimic while Kamala has a history of awkward and tone-deaf efforts to appear black.

Entire academic fields now revolve around blackness, as authentic, and of whiteness as a construct.

Talking about blackness as a construct can be dangerous especially since a significant portion of the leftist elite feigns membership in minority groups, e.g. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and that its aspiring presidential candidates, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, did not come out of the African American community, even when they did, like Cory Booker, it was after a period of code-switching in elite circles, followed by a reversion and an attempt to then reidentify as black.

Whatever one’s feelings about Kamala are, there’s little question that identifying as black was a decision for her and, unlike Obama, not a permanent one, but a situational one.

When it’s convenient, she’s black, when it’s convenient she’s Indian or even Asian, and when convenient she’s something more ambiguous.

It’s part of a pattern in which Kamala routinely disavows her own views, quotes, policies and past to be whatever empty vessel people want to see her as.

Obama was guilty of that at times, but at least you could understand where his position was at any given time, with Kamala not even that is really true anymore.