Senator Kamala Harris Supports Reparations for Slavery – But Her Jamaican Ancestors Were Plantation Slave Owners?

Guest post by Joe Hoft

Senator Kamala Harris from California stated this past week that she was for reparations for black Americans for slavery.

But, according to her father, her ancestors were plantation slave owners in Jamaica.  So is Kamala willing to pay for these reparations?

According to the New York Post Senators Harris and Elizabeth Warren support reparations for African-Americans affected by slavery.

Asked about the matter last week on the 105.1 FM show “Breakfast Club,” Harris agreed with the host that reparations are necessary to address problems of “inequities.”

 

“America has a history of 200 years of slavery. We had Jim Crow. We had legal segregation in America for a very long time,” she said on the radio show. “We have got to recognize, back to that earlier point, people aren’t starting out on the same base in terms of their ability to succeed and so we have got to recognize that and give people a lift up.”

The former attorney general doubled down on her remarks on Thursday.

“We have to be honest that people in this country do not start from the same place or have access to the same opportunities,” she said in a statement to the New York Times. “I’m serious about taking an approach that would change policies and structures and make real investments in black communities.”

The problem with Senator Harris’s comments are that her father says that her ancestors were Jamaican plantation owners.  According to his book,

As a child growing up in Jamaica, I often heard it said, by my parents and family friends: “memba whe yu cum fram”. To this day, I continue to retain the deep social awareness and strong sense of identity which that grassroots Jamaican philosophy fed in me.  As a father, I naturally sought to develop the same sensibility in my two daughters.  Born and bred in America, Kamala was the first in line to have it planted.  Maya came two years later and had the advantage of an older sibling as mentor.  It is for them to say truthfully now, not me, what if anything of value they carried from that early experience into adulthood.  My one big regret is that they did not come to know very well the two most influential women in my life: “Miss Chrishy” and “Miss Iris” (as everybody called them).  This is, in many ways, a story about these women and the heritage they gave us.

My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner (and founder of Brown’s Town) and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me).  The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural ‘produce’ exporter (mostly pimento or all-spice), who died in 1939 one year after I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town (and where, as a child, I learned the catechism, was baptized and confirmed, and served as an acolyte).

https://twitter.com/DewsNewz/status/1098757321885396992

If this is true, will Senator Harris then pay for the reparations to black Americans?

Hat tip D. Manny

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Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016. In 2023, The Gateway Pundit received the Most Trusted Print Media Award at the American Liberty Awards.

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Thanks for sharing!