Our first Canadian president

Kamala Harris is a professional LARPer

Deep in the heart of darkest Africa

Kamala Harris isn’t “black”. Neither is she really “Jamaican”, “Indian”, “South Asian”, “Tamil”, or any of the other skinsuits she puts on when it suits her. She chose a racial class specialization at the age of 20 to get into politics, which has been to her immense benefit, but the ultimate lack of a fixed point shines through as soon as she starts talking about “my identity”.

To recap, Harris’ mother was an Indian Tamil who had been in the country for less than six years when Harris was born. Bouncing around between her mother’s academic / medical appointments and with frequent visits to India, she left the country when she was twelve for Montreal.

Perhaps the blackest part of her biography is that her dad was not really in the picture after the age of six or so - custodial trips to visit at most. Much is made of the fact that when Harris was in Berkeley, from the age of roughly seven to twelve, she hung out with a lot of blacks (a 40% black elementary school and numerous intellectual types on the faculties of local colleges and socially connected with her mother). This is an odd theory of racial transmorgification. A ten year old is not discoursing on The Struggle like Jesus reading Torah as her mom makes chitchat with the neighboring heavyweights of grievance studies. I have friends who were unfortunate enough to go to significantly black elementary schools, and yet they avoided the wigger trap and did not suddenly acquire the misapprehension they were actually black. “Oh but a friend took her to a black church”, yes, and she simultaneously went to Hindu temples with her mother.

But having arrived in Canada at the time of her life when one typically refines their own identity rather than having it imposed by default by parents, this pretense ended. There were a surprising number of personages of imperial flotsam in Quebec she hung out with, but they would have been mostly British Caribbean immigrants (and likely upper-class ones like her economist father) rather than the particular American descendants of slaves she now affiliates with. So from the ages of twelve to nineteen, she was, racially speaking, basically on her own - there literally were no “African Americans” there, except to the extent that everywhere was America even then. I flatly do not believe the claim that her school was “40% black” until someone shoves a yearbook in my face, and suspect this is a retcon like when Americans think that based on advertising demographics the country must be a third black and a quarter gay.

What she did experience was cultivating this identity in the context of, basically, a cultural void. Nothing says I’m blacker than blacker than black like a lycra disco troupe, but one must have hobbies. Really, she grew up as a progressive internationalist without fixed background, in a very similar vein to Barack Obama. This might explain why they don’t particularly get along - nothing like a mirror to expose your own cringe.

But at the age of 19, having spent a couple of years at a Canadian community college, Kamala took a hard look in the mirror. What are we doing here? What is the plan? From her educational history, she was not a standout intellectual. None of her college admissions were particularly rigorous, and she did not particularly distinguish herself at any of them. She was only able to later attend law school via an affirmative action set-aside. In fact she only had two assets, which she leveraged to the hilt. First, she had a plausible claim to be black. And second, like Anne Boleyn, at some point in her French cultural exposure she developed a skill in le French perversion. These would both serve her well.

(It’s bizarre how difficult it is to find the allusions to Anne Boleyn’s purported sexual immorality via search engines, but they were very funny. Poor Henry VIII didn’t know what hit him, any more than the lovestruck Willie Brown.)

So she elected to leave the small pond of Canada, and become Black in the United States. Howard University! Sorry Mom.

Now it’s a big ask to paradrop into a foreign culture at the age of 19 and absorb the finer points - there is an infinite minefield of faux pas to navigate, and American blacks are not shy about pointing them out in the moment, at least until you achieve mascot-level prominence. But ironically the best way to work on a properly accented foreign language is to do the most exaggerated caricature of it - full “hon hon hon wee wee crusssaungh’”, “ja ich liebe die sittenpissen auf der club”, and so on. The caricatured aspects of it actually are the things which distinguish it best from your mother tongue.

Harris at some point absorbed a caricature of American blackness, which you can see on full display here, both linguistically and stylistically. The problem is that there are opposing caricatures, which she code-switches through at will.

The first is Big Momma’s House HNIC matriarch. When she wishes to be Le Tough Prosecutrix, it’s “my momma always tole me don’t come round here with that backtalk, I’ll cut a switch so fast yo head spin, ooooh lawd you know, you know, and that’s what I’m tryna do” and so on.

When she wishes to appeal to a softer lib demographic, she dons the kente cloth and pretends to celebrate kwanzaa, because it’s about what we’re doing, as a community, and I actually have a Public Enemy tape I’m listening to in the car right now, when I’m not smoking blunts with Biggie (you know how it is).

It’s very Baudrillard - whites pretending to admire a Canadian pseudo-Tamil’s idea of what an American black is, because neither has a concrete point of reference beyond what a Hollywood screenwriter has told them about the whole endeavor. Are we watching Do The Right Thing today, or is it Boyz N The Hood? Training Day or Tyler Perry?

In the finest tradition of American comedy, if you slap a horrific laugh track over the transitions, they can probably just be glossed over.