Yes, she’s eligible. Yes, she’s black enough.

Kamala Harris was announced as Joe Biden’s running mate on August 11, two days ago. That evening Leah McElrath tweeted:

I’m not going to retweet or otherwise amplify anti-Harris pundits, but, in case you were wondering, they’ve already started falsely implying Kamala isn’t *really* American.

So that was fast.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they started demanding her birth records at some point.

Birtherism 2.0

They’re going all in.

(It doesn’t “depend.” Harris was born in the United States and is an American citizen.)

McElrath referenced an article by John Eastman published by Newsweek that questions Harris’ elegibility.

This afternoon NPR reported that the nasty guy has promoted that lie. Of course he has. He was the one who pushed Birtherism against Obama.

Lauren Floyd of Daily Kos reports that various white male pundits are declaring that Harris isn’t black enough. They came to that conclusion because her ancestry doesn’t go back to slavery. Wrote Floyd that these pundits…

fail to realize is that their whiteness no longer gives them the authority to define Blackness. For many Black people who are the descendants of slaves, knowledge of our ethnic roots is a rare gift otherwise inaccessible to those stripped of their identities in order to be assigned the role of someone else’s possession.
…
The California senator’s knowledge of her roots doesn’t negate her experiences as a Black and Asian woman in America. It doesn’t save her from the discrimination and systematic oppression people who look like her have suffered for decades, and it doesn’t somehow make her less worthy of being the first Black and South Asian woman on a major party’s national ticket. Knowing her ethnicity simply makes her incredibly lucky.

Floyd added a tweet from Ragnarok Lobster:

Questioning Kamala Harris' ethnicity is not gonna help explain why Trump wants to gut Social Security.

Actually, I think it does. Both the question and the nasty guy’s desire to gut Social Security are aspects of supremacy.

Aysha Qamar of Kos schools us on the correct pronunciation of the new candidate’s name. It is Comma-la. Pronouncing it correctly is a sign of respect. Which is exactly why several conservative pundits are intentionally mispronouncing it.

Mr. Reagan tweeted:

Kamala Harris’ great-great-great-grandfather was Hamilton Brown, a prominent slave owner in Jamaica. Just saying.

Lauren-Ashley Howard replied:

I have news for you about the descendants of enslaved Africans—damn near ALL of us have a Hamilton Brown in our family tree. Because enslaved women were regularly raped by the white men who owned them. You tried it, though.

Denise Oliver-Velez added:

I'm one of them, descended from slaveholding rapists in VA - and if you look at a multitude of Black family trees you'll find the same thing.

There were several more replies similar to this: What does Harris’ great-great-great-grandfather being a slave owner have to do with her? And if it does, what about all those Southern white men whose ancestors did own slaves and raped some of them?



Mark Sumner of Kos reported on Vladimir Putin’s announcement that Russia now has a vaccine for the coronavirus. It seems weird to announce a vaccine that’s been tested on only 76 people. So Sumner laid out the situation. Despite jiggered polls saying otherwise Putin is highly unpopular. Just like his protege the nasty guy. So just like the nasty guy wants to he is declaring a vaccine, a Russian vaccine at that, in hopes that it will boost his popularity.



Laura Clawson of Kos notes that because of the nasty guy the phrase “saying the quiet part out loud” is getting a workout. The latest is admission that he will refuse to sign any coronavirus relief bill that includes any kind of funding for the Postal Service. He won’t have to pull out his veto stamp because Moscow Mitch will make sure such a bill doesn’t get through the Senate.

Don’t go looking for any sort of relief bill any time soon because it is time for the Congressional August recess. And when they get back they have three weeks to do something about the 2021 federal budget that starts October 1. So if you get evicted in the next month I’m sure they’ll be home and will let you in.



One reason why the nasty guy is able to do many of the nasty things he’s done is because many people in power are as supremacist as he is. I hope this isn’t news to you. Yeah, there’s the GOP in Congress, but there are also the thugs in ICE and in Customs and Border Patrol both on their regular beat and their stint in Portland, OR. And, as Gabe Ortiz of Kos reports, there are local sheriffs eager to feed detainees into ICE custody.



I heard a delightful story on NPR this morning. Julie Be is a music therapist. Most summers she is part of the team that runs Camp Aranu’tiq in New Hampshire for transgender and nonbinary kids. Of course, not this year. So Be and her singing partner Anya Rose, who together are Ants on a Log, created an album titled Trans & Nonbinary Kids Mix. They put out an open call for songs that reflect the kids’ experience. Some of the adults wished they had these songs when young. The resulting album sounds pretty cool! The 7 minute audio has samples from several of the songs.