Black Americans should hold the adoration — Kamala Harris has done real damage | Opinion

There’s an opinion that’s been kept fairly silent in the present political climate and mainstream conversation about Sen. Kamala Harris, Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick. Across social media, in a kind of herd-policing that makes expression of contrary opinions unlikely, uncomfortable truths about Harris are quickly deprioritized as pedestrian or simply contrarian, anti-black, “party-pooper” — and even pro-Trump.

Throughout her career, Harris, a woman of South-Asian and Jamaican ethnicity, has been several black “firsts” on the basis of her race and gender, and now again as Biden’s VP pick. This has gained a spotlight on the global stage, even though her mother’s Tamil Brahmin upbringing “likely afforded her the Indian equivalent of white privilege,” according to bloombergquint.com.

Growing up in Oakland and predominantly white Berkeley, then Montreal, Canada, Harris blended well with “a lot of rich kids . . . and mixed in with kids from the lower area,” according to CBC Television. In her final year of attendance at Howard University, a historic black institution, Harris joined the sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha.

The mission of AKA is “service to all mankind,” an idea irreconcilable with Harris’ career — a war chest brimming with prosecutorial mismanagement that has landed wrongfully convicted persons behind bars and launched revenue-building initiatives that have separated children from parents — adding to generational oppression in predominantly Black and brown families under the color of law. For years, AKA Harris has delivered a ruthless brand of “service.”

Under Harris, the New York Times recounted, prosecutors “unlawfully held back potentially exculpatory evidence” in the case of George Gage, resulting in a 70-year sentence at San Quentin on charges of sexual abuse. Those charges were later proven false and dismissed by the trial judge, but upheld under appeal on technicality. Because Harris declined to withdraw prosecution, Gage, now 80 and partially blind, remains incarcerated, still, 20 years later.

Under Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harris tried to reduce the number of school dropouts that end up in prison. This was, perhaps, a noble effort, navigated catastrophically. Under her truancy law, parents could be penalized at the discretion of the school administrator; of course, prosecutors could bring charges against parents, and parents could see a year in jail, plus a $2,500 fine. The results? Life-altering criminal records and financial burdens often falling on single-parent heads of mostly Black and brown households.

Cheree Peoples is the parent of a child born with the debilitating disease, sickle cell anemia. Peoples suffered the public humiliation of a broad daylight arrest under the truancy law. In an interview with attorney Antonio Moore, she said that she’d been in recent talks with her daughter’s school about a Section 504 plan, an effort to spare the troubles they would eventually encounter anyway. Harris made sure of it:

“We are putting parents on notice,” she said. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”

Then, predictably, following announcement of her bid in the Democratic presidential primaries, after years of having stood by her truancy law, Harris apologized. On “Pod Save America,” she expressed remorse “that anything that I did could have led to [parents arrests and incarceration].” Harris is relying on our good sportsmanship to overcome her past. She’s asking for trust from the same Black communities that she has oppressed.

There’s a tendency among some to claim victory with every Black “first” — regardless of virtue. “Today, Kamala Harris is being paraded [by] AKAs, to black female Howard grads, to black males in professional spaces in a way that she [doesn’t] deserve,” says Moore.

What kind of person is it that celebrates Black achievement on the backs of Black people?

And there’s the weed thing. Harris smoked marijuana at Howard, ‘‘and I did inhale,” she said, “playing up parts of her identity in order to impress Black voters,” according to the New York TImes. Fine, but then she campaigned against legalization in 2010 and 2014; and under Harris, nearly 1,600 people were sentenced to prison for marijuana-related offenses.

Harris has done all of this to Black and brown people in the name of justice. What will she do to us in the name of democracy?

Carla Bell is a Seattle writer of cultural criticism and has written for Essence and Ebony magazines, Electric Literature and The Seattle Times.