Kamala Harris’ Jamaican roots should be admired, not distorted by conservatives

Just hours after Joe Biden announced California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, the right-wing disinformation factory began throwing all kinds of racist charges about her ancestry.

Though she was born in Oakland and unquestionably meets the “natural born citizen” requirement for the vice presidency as outlined in Article II of the Constitution, some legal gadflies began pumping the absurd idea that she didn’t truly qualify because her parents were immigrants. And just as risible was that her family had been a “beneficiary” of Jamaican slavery in the 19th century.

The most pernicious slanders have at least a distant relationship with fact, which is what gives them a fishhook into the consciousness. But they also have a total lack of context that amounts to a form of lying. Such is the case with the portrayal of Harris’ likely ancestral relationship with Hamilton Brown, Jr., a white man who emigrated to colonial Jamaica from County Antrim, Ireland at some point in the late 1700s.

Harris’ father Donald, a professor, published a piece in Jamaica Global in 2018 entitled “Reflections of a Jamaican Father” in which he fondly recalled life-lessons from his paternal grandmother, a woman he called Miss Chrishy. He noted in a parenthesis she was: “née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town.”

Evidence supports this. Hamilton Brown was an ardent public defender of slavery, as well as an “attorney” who directly managed the affairs of absentee plantation owners enjoying their wealth back in Britain and took 6% on every transaction. Jamaica was a debauched Wild West “get rich or die trying” place for white immigrants like Brown, who typically made more than 50 times the income of his peers in New England if he could profit from slavery while surviving a battery of tropical diseases.

Colonial Office documents preserved by the Legacies of British Slave Ownership Database maintained by University College, London show that Brown developed relationships with some of the biggest sugar plantations on the island and was able to buy his own estate, which he named Antrim. At its height in 1832, Brown had a labor force that reached a maximum of 159 enslaved people. The anti-slavery crusader Charles Whitely wrote that Brown insisted that enslaved people enjoyed “happiness and comfort” in their bondage, despite routine whippings and endless toil in the canefields.

Brown was particularly active in seeking reparations after slavery’s end — just not on behalf of those who had actually suffered. The Slave Abolition Act of 1833 obtained Parliament’s approval only after the government promised an outright 20 million pound collective payoff to those, like Brown, who had to surrender their human property. Records show that Brown handled the government reparations for at least 15 slaveowners to compensate for their “loss” of human property. He also joined the Colonial Church Union — a Ku Klux Klan-style terror organization of its day — to protest British emancipation. He lost his post in the militia because of it.

It also appears Brown also took one of the customary liberties of men of his class in Jamaica, which was to rape enslaved women. The practice was so widespread that white men who did not indulge in forcing sex on enslaved women, either in their custody or loaned to them, were regarded as killjoys and tended to be shunned from social gatherings. At some of these parties, enslaved women were paraded before the men, who would then take their pick.

Baptismal records from St. Ann’s Parish show that Brown had a daughter named Mary Melvina in 1839, but the space listing her mother was left blank. There is no evidence that Hamilton Brown ever married — a common status for white men in colonial Jamaica. This combined with the lack of unmarried white women on the island speaks loudly to the probability that Melvina was the offspring of a forced union with an unnamed woman who had been enslaved and then legally emancipated after abolition became final in 1838.

Brown would have had reason to leave her name out of the registry: the fathers of mixed-race offspring in colonial Jamaica sometimes acknowledged their children, but rarely advertised their precise heritage.

There is also persuasive documentary evidence unearthed by Snopes that Mary Melvina was the mother of Donald Harris’s grandmother Christiania Brown. Which would make Kamala Harris the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Hamilton Brown. In fact, a good portion of the population of modern Jamaica have forced copulations with slave owners in their lineage, which, according to the scholar Trevor Burnard, would put Donald Harris and his daughter Kamala firmly in the grain of the Jamaican middle class.

This piece of genealogy supplies the grain of truth to the right-wing lie that Harris’ family profited from slavery. But it’s a distortion as grotesque as Brown’s idea that enslaved people lived in “happiness and comfort.” In reality, they suffered almost unimaginable brutalities under the reign of Brown and those like him, and his presence in the family tree was almost certainly the result of rape.

Donald Harris moved to Berkeley in 1963 to get his PhD in economics, which is where he met Kamala’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan. The story of the vice presidential candidate’s family is rich and varied and contains many threads, a family heritage of struggle against adversity and the horrors of slavery. Her story is one to be admired, not distorted.

This story was originally published August 30, 2020 at 5:00 AM.