Millions of Black Americans are descended from slaveholders who fathered children with women they owned. White ancestry is especially common among those of us whose families were enslaved in Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia, where the planter class was notorious for its mixed-race children.
My white great-great-grandfather, who managed the estate where my great-great-grandmother was held captive, was probably unknown even a county away. However, the wealthy slave owner whom Kamala Harris’s father, Donald Harris, claims as part of the family tree was someone to be reckoned with on both sides of the Atlantic. Hamilton Brown was believed to have been born in County Antrim, Ireland, in 1776. He set out to make his fortune in the Caribbean sugar trade and the commerce in human beings upon which it depended. By the early 19th century, he was remaking St. Ann Parish in Jamaica, from his estate not far from Montego Bay.
Donald Harris grew up during the 1940s and ’50s in a settlement known as Brown’s Town. He was baptized, confirmed and installed as an acolyte in the grand Anglican church that Hamilton Brown had built. The family members who watched over Donald Harris when he was a child included his paternal grandmother, Christiana Brown, who owned a dry goods store and traced her lineage to Mr. Brown.
The Hamilton Brown story has been getting its media moment since Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee. The people of Brown’s Town as well as County Antrim seem thrilled at the possibility of a connection to a president. In the Black diaspora generally, the story strikes a note of recognition among those of us who have always spoken openly of the slaveholders who gained entrance to our families, whether through rape or consensual relations.
But the Irish slave baron’s story has also become the target of a trolling campaign aimed at denying Kamala Harris the right to a Black identity. Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing provocateur, said she was ineligible to declare herself a descendant of the enslaved because she might have had an owner of slaves among her forebears. The radio host Mark Levin assumed that because her mother was from India and her father was from Jamaica, “to the best of my knowledge, her ancestry does not go back to slavery at all.”
Had Kamala Harris been young and unformed, she might have reacted to such comments by deploying stories of the family’s ancestry in Jamaica, a blood-drenched epicenter of the trade in human beings. But by the time this inquisition started, during her 2020 campaign for president, she had long since seen that there was no upside in explaining herself to people who were obsessed with questions of racial identify. Her answer to such questions had become, as she told The Washington Post: “I am who I am. I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.”
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