Applying the term “African American” to her when she doesn’t even apply it to herself is really something to behold https://twitter.com/royathewriter/status/1293674191972171776

To be clear, I don’t have a problem with her refusing to play the game in the video below. But she declines to call herself “black” or “African American” when asked. Elsewhere she uses “WOC”, so it’s just wild to me that she is put in that category anyway https://twitter.com/afrdiasporanews/status/1090476216694525954?s=21 https://twitter.com/afrdiasporanews/status/1090476216694525954

People are like: Of course race isn’t biologically real, there’s nothing genetic that makes you black but 1) Kamala Harris is Af-Am because her dad is Jamaican. And 2) blackness is fluid and it depends on life experiences and self-definition yet Rachel Dolezal cannot be black.

Okay, so race isn’t real and it is not dependent on how you look, but some people cannot be black and Harris is nonetheless the first African-American woman nominee for VP?

If it’s not real—which i agree it is not—then why submit to and reproduce the language of racecraft? Why not speak more generally: KH is, as she has said of herself, an American.

And why not at the same time speak more specifically: KH is an American woman of Indian (Tamil) and Jamaican (African and British) descent.

If race is real, then there might be some shared essence that links someone in Jamaica to someone in America.

But if it is not real then we should make the effort to decline to slot people with distinct backgrounds into such abstract color boxes.

Finally, one thing that is clear is that no one who is openly descended from the people who were enslaved in the American South has yet risen to the top in American politics and it might be worthwhile thinking through why that might be instead of glossing over these distinctions.

This last point is the one that ADOS makes damningly well and is, I think, willfully neglected in the mainstream discourse.