An informed public had reason to be grateful last week that we still have a media with the resources to check stuff.
The New York Times, most prominently, was able to confirm in considerable detail what almost everybody had already presumed or known: that Vice President Kamala Harris, whose father is an immigrant from Jamaica, has consistently identified as Black over the course of her career.
Harris, whose mother was from India, will be the first woman president of the U.S. if elected in November, and that historic moment would come with several other firsts.
Fortunately, the Trump nonsense that was heard at the National Association of Black Journalists was quickly debunked and condemned. The featured speaker, who so often makes us feel we’re sitting in some dystopia of the near future, said of his opponent in November, “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
Not entirely coincidentally, the vice president was linked in a few conservative outlets in the U.S. with a slave-owner called Hamilton Brown, who was born north of Ballymoney, Co. Antrim. He would be a distant ancestor – four greats-grandfather – although no one has found proof. But not distant in terms of place, as her father, Donald Harris, grew up in the Jamaican administrative area known as St. Ann Parish, which is important to the Brown story.
Harris, a retired Stanford economics professor, wrote in a 2018 essay profiling his grandmothers that “Miss Chrishy,” on the paternal side, was born Christiana Brown, and was, he believes, a descendant of Hamilton Brown’s.
Donald Harris’s paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy, who was born Christiana Brown.
Back in 2020, when this was mentioned, Irish historian and broadcaster Myles Dungan said that the vice-presidential nominee wouldn’t likely be making tracks to Ballymoney; the Irish Times made the same obvious point in recent weeks. But neither asked: isn’t four greats-grandfather a little far back?
President Barack Obama’s link to County Offaly immigrant Falmuth Kearney was a bit of a stretch at three greats, But then his father was Luo Kenyan and so there was a particular curiosity about his Kansan mother Lena Denham’s roots. It turns out they were English mostly, but there were also a few bloodlines that were Scottish, Welsh, Irish, German and even African, via a slave named John Punch.
U.S. President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama when they visited the village of Moneygall , Co. Offaly, on May 23, 2011. [RollingNews.ie]
As recalled in last week's Echo, Boston genealogist Jim McNiff in 2020 had raised the possibility that the Irish connection in Vice-President Harris’s case might be somewhat closer, 1/16th, rather than the 1/64th in the would-be Brown connection.
In his 2018 essay, Donald Harris said his maternal grandmother “Miss Iris,” was born Iris Finegan, c. 1888. But McNiff found a record for a marriage of Orah Iris Allen to Patrick Finegan in 1908, and a birth record for one of their children in 1913. He discovered, too, that a Jesuit priest, Fr. Patrick Mulry, who was long based in Jamaica, had mentioned in dispatches his encounters with members of a family of Finnegans (his spelling) in St. Ann Parish in 1904 and 1906, and that they were of mixed race, with a young adult son named Patrick; additionally, the priest seemed to suggest that the father, also Patrick Finnegan, by then deceased, had come from Ireland.
Kamala Harris pictured with her great-grandmother Miss Iris when visiting Jamaica in 1966. [Photo: Donald Harris]
Of course, it may turn out these Finegans belong to two separate families. Miss Iris, who blessed and predicted great things for her great-granddaughter Kamala in 1966 when she was placed on her lap, may not have married into those Catholic Finegans. But even separately, the Jesuit’s acquaintances and Donald Harris’s kin seem intrinsically interesting.
People love straight lines in bloodlines, however, and so we know Queen Elizabeth II was a direct descendant of Mary Queen of Scots, and not her cousin Queen Elizabeth I, who was one of those childless cat ladies we’ve been hearing about.
J.D. Vance would be delighted to know that Mary, despite being beheaded, had the last laugh as her descendants have been on the throne all this time.
Stephen McCracken, a Northern Ireland historian quoted in the media about Brown, said he started out thinking it would be a nice story, like those of others who traced their roots back to the region.
But those are often actual family stories of migration. For example, three of the five first-generation American presidents had Ulster parentage -- Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan and Chester Arthur; (the others being Trump via his Scottish mother and Obama through his Kenyan father).
When he was a child, JFK had four living grandparents, all first-generation Americans born to people who traveled from Ireland in the 19th century. Upon his assassination in 1963, the 35th president was survived by his maternal grandmother, the former Mary Josephine Hannon. Not two decades earlier his maternal grandfather, John Fitzgerald, introduced him to his former constituents as he set out on an illustrious political career.
This contrasts with the Daily Mail approach of July 23 entitled, “Kamala Harris' great-great-great-great grandfather was 'notorious' Irish slave owner who bought Jamaican plantation and travelled to London to fight abolition, historian claims.” The historian (McCracken) is quoted saying Brown was a “not nice fellow.”
There was a testing and a probing here, obviously, to see what works and what doesn’t.
The website Finish the Race, which describes itself as “News and Opinion With a Christian World View,” published an essay with the breathtakingly stupid headline, “Unveiling the Past: Kamala Harris and Her Family’s Legacy of Slave Ownership.”
The text doesn’t disappoint either. Author Ella Ford wrote, “This historical fact underscores the complexities within Harris’s lineage and presents a challenge for her political narrative, which often emphasizes her commitment to social justice and equality.”
If you’re personally opposed to something, how exactly can it present a challenge to your political narrative?
One aspect of her “family’s” legacy of slave ownership, of course, was that most of them were slaves before abolition was passed in London; and few of Harris’s Jamaican antecedents would have made the racial grade if they were living in America, most particularly in the South, the birthplace of modern Christian conservatism.
Things have gotten much better, thankfully, so that Jamaican immigrant Donald Harris could become a Stanford professor, and his elder daughter could rise to the office of vice president of the U.S., and be her party’s presumptive nominee for president.
The Daily Mail set out to make similar points to Ford’s, though more subtly, before going on, less than subtly, to dismiss the vice president in a piece that’s several thousand words long – a profile article with lots of information, in essence, and yet slave-owner Hamilton Brown is the focus of its headline.
Now, I’m sure that Daily Mail editors and managers get tired of folks so often making reference to their paper’s (and that of the owner, the great-grandfather of the current one) long-ago enthusiasm for and fawning over Hitler, Mussolini and the wannabe home-grown version called Oswald Mosley. Sometimes it can be unfair and beside the point. Maybe those people should let it go already? But then one remembers, in this instance, that by the 1930s Hamilton Brown was already dead 100 years.
What was that New York tagline from the Channel 5 news? “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?” How about: “It’s 2024. Can you account morally for all 64 of your great-great-great-great-grandparents?”
