When the air shifts its scorching weight just so, and begins to allow the cool streams of summer’s evenings to take over, I find my courage to venture out for a walk around the neighbourhood. Another full cycle has come knocking, I say to myself, in cautious tones so it does not ring out loud like an admonition against self; a reprieve that I may have stayed too long in this land of cyclic seasons and strange sojourning.
Yet there’s something about this place that has lodged itself deeply into my becoming. There’s a foreign bone packed with the marrow of experience, encounters and educating. That bone is stuck in there, and over the years of accommodating its foreignness, it has calcified into character. It’s a bone that has made the soldier in me more prepared to take up arms and go to war for that which makes us whole, restores our dignity, and against that which diminishes our civility. And I’m about to go to war for Kamala Harris.
Walk with me
But first, take a walk with me. Up the street, just a five-minute walk from my home is the Natural History Society of Maryland building. I’ve been here before for neighbourhood events like paint night to raise funds for our arts festival. I come to the building’s parking lot on occasional Saturdays to buy fresh produce from the local seasonal farmers’ market.
This building is also the place where something phenomenal happened in 1913. A group of women suffragists marching over 200 miles for three months from New York to Washington DC stopped here to rest up for the night. I live in the shadow of one of American history’s most inspirational women’s movement that fought for the right of women to vote.
I stand there in the quiet of the evening summer breeze and close my eyes. In my mind’s eye, I can see the reported 5,000 to 10,000 women marchers finally arrive in Baltimore, worn out, shoes and laces desperately clasping the feet they protected with fierce resolve. The neighbourhood has opened their homes for the women to spend the night. The local priest, Dr. Cyrus Cort, is against the women’s fight to be heard through the ballot, but he is voted down, and the women are welcome to stay in the neighborhood.
This connection to history fills me with inspiration. It’s enough for me that my neighbourhood played a part in this struggle. No matter what, I will carry on that spirit of welcoming the warrior, giving them rest, and replenishing their supplies as long as I have the means. It is because of these women that I, an African in America, have pitched my tent here and can vote for the leaders I want.
The women suffragists stopping in my neighbourhood is all reported in a New York Times article on February 1913. The marchers woke up early the next morning and marched on down past where I live and headed on to Washington DC. With them they carried banners, one which read: “New York State denies the vote to criminals, lunatics, idiots and women.” When they arrived in Washington DC, they held up another sign, which read: “We demand an amendment to the Constitution of the United States enfranchising the women of this country.” But things were not going to change overnight.
It wasn’t until seven years after those women came by what is now my neighborhood that the 19th amendment was signed, giving women the right to vote. But that’s not what’s shocking. This fight started in 1848 when the women established the National Women’s Suffrage Association. It took them 70 years to achieve that goal!
Let’s zoom out and get an even truer perspective. The United States Constitution, written in 1787, states that all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But it took over 130 years for women to achieve that equality as voting citizens. This did not include black women!
There’s a sadness about this struggle that only America’s foundation of racism could have enabled. White women who fought for equality left out black women. Some of those in the leadership ranks voiced out their concern that black women did not have the same rights as white women. Ida B. Wells, a black woman suffragists born into slavery, fought for black women’s place in the struggle. They were allowed to march from the back of the parade. History records that she bravely led her team of black women to the front. While the 19th amendment of 1920 gave women the right to vote, it wasn’t until 45 years later that black women gained their right to vote. This background connects the dots from women’s suffrage to the nomination of Kamala Harris, a black woman, for the vice presidency.
Kamala Harris in the African context
European society looked upon women as men’s property, childish, prone to irrational thought, and therefore dependent on their husbands for decision-making. Unfortunately, this is a worldview that European colonisation imposed on Africa.
African societies had women in positions of power and public influence long before European intervention. They were queens who ran kingdoms alongside men. They were warriors who fought in battles and medicine women who healed. They were priests who held oracular power that could be more powerful that the king’s political office. They also comfortably occupied the private space of their homes as mothers and nurturers of life.
While the 19th amendment of 1920 gave women the right to vote, it wasn’t until 45 years later that black women gained their right to vote. This background connects the dots from women’s suffrage to the nomination of Kamala Harris, a black woman, for the vice presidency.
Sufficient research by African scholars shows that before the intervention, African societies recognised the complementarity role that both male and female genders played. The ordinary African woman was not considered fickle of mind like the European woman. In fact, in most societies, she ran the markets, determined the prices, and controlled the location of trading. This phenomenon is still very present in African countries where, for example, “mama mboga” is the predominant trader in local markets. If something happens to the market spaces, it is women who speak out and fight to have things corrected. The Western concept of markets, on the other hand, is dominated by men. There are still very few white women in political and trading spaces. In the United States, there are only seven black women who have conquered the heights of financial bosses in big companies. The Western world has a lot to learn from pre-intervention Africa.
So why are African women celebrating the nomination of Kamala Harris to the vice president candidacy in America if they were way ahead in recognising the complementarity of genders? Because things changed, and now we draw inspiration from the global black woman who rises against the odds. Colonial powers in Africa strategised to place men in powerful positions and relegated women to private spaces where decisions affecting society were not made. Over time, colonial and post-colonial African men began to think of themselves as superior to their women. This was never the reality.
When Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi admonished the environmentalist, Professor Wangari Maathai, in public, telling her she should know that African culture demands a woman should be subservient to men, he was wrong. African elders raised in colonial Africa are not to be trusted with Africa’s memory. They are the ones who sided with the white usurpers and kicked our mothers out of their places of honour. Many have misled a generation that is now slowly beginning to discover the truth about an Africa whose civilizations fully included women. In ancient Africa, from a gender perspective, Kamala Harris’s nomination would have been ordinary.
We have forgotten the African institutions that had nurtured powerful women who were not an oddity to Africans. In spite of the destruction of Africa’s gender complementarity systems, Africa’s new nations have not needed to fight the same battles that Western women have had to fight. Kenyan women do not need a suffrage movement.
When Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi admonished the environmentalist, Professor Wangari Maathai, in public, telling her she should know that African culture demands a woman should be subservient to men, he was wrong. African elders raised in colonial Africa are not to be trusted with Africa’s memory.
To arrive at the place of complementarity that satisfactorily caters to women’s needs and talents in leadership, African women activists must include a restoration of memory, an education on how African societies so naturally came to produce women like Mekatilili wa Menza, Yenenga, Asantewa, and a string of queen mothers across Africa. What white women have been fighting for is a place that African women had long figured out how to structure, and then violently forced to forget.
The novelty of Kamala Harris in American politics comes from a society that is still very young in building institutions of gender complementarity. America is culturally a baby compared to Africa’s ethno-cultural nations and territories before they were arbitrarily bunched up together as Westphalian nation-states. Yet the irony is that African women now find inspiration in Harris’s nomination as one of them.
Perhaps someday, African scholars will teach and inspire America in building what Africa once had so that the occurrence of a Kamala Harris or a Barack Obama in the 21st century would not be so shocking an achievement. When Cheikh Anta Diop attempted to teach about the ancient wisdom of Africa’s matriarchal systems and civilizations of black Kemet that contributed to Western knowledge, he was fought ruthlessly by the French and denied the right to teach.
Slowly, the present-day Anta Diops will arise, return memory to Africans, and gift the Western world with the idea of how to make a black woman presidency as common as that of a rich white male. When Shirley Chisholm, an educator and writer, became the first black woman elected to the US Congress in 1969, where she served seven terms, and then boldly ran for president on a major party ticket in 1972, she carried within her this easy knowledge from her African ancestors – the knowing that there was nothing out of place about a black women leading a country, a kingdom, an army.
I’m caught between celebrating Kamala Harris and chastising America for its exceedingly slow pace in bringing women to powerful public spaces. The black movement does not yet have the power to steer more Harrises to the top. There’s a war of intra-black identities brewing. And I’m caught between different blacknesses. Racial identity in America is a web of chains that you struggle through. One encounters three streams of consciousness: unquestioned belonging of whiteness; uncertain discomfort of in-betweens; and the dangerous branding of blackness. Kamala Harris belongs to the in-between identities that have lately kept shifting and disturbing a nation that demands neat extremes.
Kamala, the in-between
She’s black, she’s Indian, she’s American. In this country, race is everything. It is the thread that knits this country’s identity, with the warp and weft of black and white extremes inextricably holding together the character of a nation knit with the needles of structural and performative violence. This aspect of violence comes out with shocking clarity in the dissection of George Floyd’s murder.
In spite of her mixed-race heritage, in the American construct, Harris is considered a black woman. In Kenya, she would be called white – mzungu – either as a result of her Anglophone American culture or on account of her much lighter skin. The black/white racial dichotomy in Kenya holds little to no relevance in the functional identity of Kenya. And if you are mixed-race with one of your parents being white, you are still more mzungu than mwafrika in Kenya. The way it goes in America, if you even have a drop of black in you, you are considered black.
Historically, some people with that drop of black chose to pass for white in order to have an easier life in a country where being black is a heavy cross upon which one is hung and bleeds from wounds of indignity to the end of their days. It doesn’t matter that a black person becomes the president, a billionaire, a Nobel laureate… if they are black, they are just below the line of consideration as human beings. Kamala Harris, a black women who is also in-between races, to have been nominated as the Democratic vice presidential candidate, is both discomforting and at once dangerous for Americans.
Conspiracy theories as puerile as birtherism and their manic regurgitation have been a hallmark of this current regime. That Ms. Harris is now a victim of this idiocy fueled by the president is no surprise. Something tells me she has the firepower to fight back that Obama did not have. She showed her mettle during the Democratic presidential candidacy campaigns when she fearlessly confronted Joe Biden. The debates against their Republican opponents can’t come soon enough. Black people do not have the luxury to play nice. They have to know how to throw lethal punches using nothing but their smarts. And as a Howard University alumna, Ms. Harris comes with confidence and pride. She is fearless because she inculcated black intellectualism as a dominant body of thinking during her four years at this university.
But the black identity is growing more complex in America, especially when it comes to power. Harris’s nomination is not only discomforting to white nationalists and good white folk who silently feel threatened by the encroaching shadow of darker-skinned people that translates to lowered value of life and living; it is also discomforting to some black people who are unable to think outside of the compartmentalisation of race purity.
The identity psychosis of black purists
On the black identity extreme, accusations of “she’s not black enough” have already started. The smear campaigns that she’s not black at all are staples that benefit both extremes of racial purity. The keepers of both black and white racial purity have built a thought citadel of power and belonging that is tiered, with the top level of political representation, social influencers and paradigm shifters belonging to a select few for the rest to gaze upon and feel proud and well represented.
These citadels of black racial purity are heavily fenced in with qualification criteria that range from parentage, ancestry, political ideology, social association, upbringing, and yes, the unspoken inanity of skin tones. Black purists, such as the American Descendants of Slaves movement (ADOS), are peddling she’s-not-black-enough prejudices – an accusation that is as callous as the president’s fueling of birtherism conspiracies.
Harris has fully embraced her mother’s Indian heritage and proudly declared her black identity in America. Yet there is still a problem for some vocal ADOS members who argue that her black Jamaican father who came to the United States as a student is not a descendant of American slavery, and therefore his progeny cannot claim to understand the issues that black people in America really face. It does not matter to these black purists that Harris was born and raised in America as a black person with the same racist experiences an ADOS would have faced.
Conspiracy theories as puerile as birtherism and their manic regurgitation have been a hallmark of this current regime. That Ms. Harris is now a victim of this idiocy fueled by the president is no surprise. Something tells me she has the firepower to fight back that Obama did not have.
During desegregation, Harris was bussed to school as a black girl and faced the isolation and rejection of the white school she was being bussed to. When you are the instrument of experimentation in the pursuit of a more perfect union, the whip of the master’s fightback lands on you through the jeers and indignities you suffer alone in school. Regardless of privileges she might have had as a light-skinned educated woman – because this is America where human value is often measured by the shade of one’s epidermis – Harris has worn that branding of blackness since she was born.
But the psychosis of racism for black people has been long and brutal, and some have reacted to it by taking that very same excoriating system and building a caste system of black identity. This tiered privilege is presented by influential ADOS persons as “lineage”, where an up-coming black person is pushed into declaring her ancestry. By that declaration, she gets shelved into the appropriate caste of blackness: Pure Black; Pass for Black; Not Black Enough, Not Black at All.
As a continental African immigrant, I belong to the last tier – Not Black at All – and I dare not be caught by an ADOS speaking authoritatively on any issues of black experience in America regardless of the fact that the American system considers me a black person. The police will kill a black immigrant African with no less depravity that they killed George Floyd; and my resume will and has often been thrown into the bin as quickly as Shaniqua’s because we both have an African or black name.
Last year, Don Lemon, a CNN anchor sympathetic to ADOS, sparked a fury about Kamala Harris’s lineage: “She’s black, yes, but is she African American?” he asked. A splitting of black hairs and hierarchies. Like Barack Obama before her, these keepers of American black purity questioned where these problematic in-betweens should fit in the black identity spectrum.
Meanwhile, right wing blacks have also joined the bandwagon of policing the black identity against the collective interests of a people who share the same enemy. Observing all this is the Master who chuckles gleefully at the spectacle. So, gleefully, the president’s son retweeted a black right wing provocateur who claimed about Kamala: “She comes from Jamaican slave owners. She’s not an American Black. Period.” Whether such tweets are generated by Russian bots or not, there is enough communication with real black purists that hold the same views.
This tiered privilege is presented by influential ADOS persons as “lineage”, where an up-coming black person is pushed into declaring her ancestry. By that declaration, she gets shelved into the appropriate caste of blackness: Pure Black; Pass for Black; Not Black Enough, Not Black at All.
If these black purism voices rise to a critical mass, they would win the argument that Harris could not possibly represent or understand the grievances of American descendants of slaves because her Asian-Jamaican lineage disqualifies her. It’s mind-boggling.
The psychosis of exclusive belongings kneecaps black rising everywhere. Purposeful black unity is possible and necessary in conquering the 21st century institutions of modern slavery. In the United States, the main one is the prison industrial complex that incarcerates black people at over five times the rate of white people, according to the US Department of Justice. Globally, the institution of economic slavery binds us all. The Washington Consensus economic hegemony still holds hostage African nations and the global black economy. It is naïve to not understand this connection between all descendants of African peoples. It needs to be clarified that I speak of a black unity of purpose that could and should be achieved through black diversity and through the necessary recognition that blacks are not and never have been a monolith.
Healing the black mind
What has happened and is still happening to black people in America can never be fully expressed in any manner of language. The one thing that ADOS have right is the insistence that they have a unique experience that no other black person who has not borne the inherited burden on the enslaved ancestry can fully understand. Uniqueness though does not mean that a non-ADOS is incapable of learning the history of African Americans and making intelligent decisions that dare to build a country that helps heals the minds of black people, restores justice and recognises their humanity. Is Kamala Harris up for this challenge? Time will tell.
