is she black enough to get kicked out of a restaurant back in the day in the Jim Crow South? (many shades of blackness)

“Conservatives Rush Limbaugh and Dinesh D’Souza called Kamala Harris, whose mother was born in India and whose father was born in Jamaica, not ‘African American’ or ‘American black’. You can dissect Kamala Harris’s heritage however you want, but to say she’s not black? 

You have to ask yourself, is she black enough to get kicked out of a restaurant back in the day in the Jim Crow South? Would she have been black enough to get redlined? Is she black enough to be kept out of a whites-only school as a little girl? Then she’s black! 

What’s especially ironic about conservative media trying to exclude Harris from blackness, is that it’s the reverse of what white America did for centuries: defining as many people as black as possible, whether they wanted it or not. 

For example the ‘one-drop rule’, the historical practice of defining blackness by the existence of a single black ancestor, which was never meant to accurately portray the black experience or many shades of blackness itself. 

It was made with the singular intention of finding the most efficient way to exclude as many people as possible from whiteness. So yes, it is disgusting that these people are now trying to exclude Kamala Harris from being black.” —Trevor Noah

http://idiocracy23.blogspot.com/2016/06/john-hulse-collected-poems-1985-2015.html

“A magisterial collection. A combination of Bukowski’s Last Night On Earth and Orwell’s 1984.”