Once In The White House President Harris Sheds Her Blackness - 'I'm Really White, You Know'

Kamala Harris narrowly defeated Donald Trump in the Presidential election of 2024, and did so, as one Republican politician observed, by being Oprah Winfrey, Mother Teresa, and Gandhi all rolled into one.  She played every possible card in the deck, avoiding the issues - they would come later once she was in the White House, and besides, as she admitted to a close friend, the American public was as befuddled as she was about debt ceilings, interest rates, and balance of payments.  

The election would be about women and black people with a touch of compassion, personality, and human concern.  Her presence, her very being would embody the very goodness, kindness, and generosity that her opponent lacked.  This image of graciousness would win the day. 

Of course she would emphasize her blackness - the first black woman to rise to the highest office of the land, a combination of African American style, culture, and creds and feminist power.  Of course the blackness was a bit of a stretch, for her father was Jamaican and famous one at that, economic advisor to the President and later Professor of Economics at Stanford, basically as white as you can get while still being black; but no one on the campaign trail cared about such details.  

It was enough for her to say she was black, and that was enough.  The public didn't have to know that her father hobnobbed with white people all his life, was far more comfortable with Paul Krugman than  Snoop Dog.  She was black, and that was all there was to it. 

Of course she was half Asian - her mother was a full-blooded Indian - but speaking electorally that didn't amount to much.  In fact she downplayed the Indian angle because most Indians were big money Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, billionaires who played the market, invested in Wall Street instruments, and sat on top of a financial pyramid.  Let the Republicans have that one - up by the bootstraps, individualism, their brand of multiculturalism.  For her, the black thang was her ticket to the White House. 

Of course she couldn't go black preacher.  Not only wouldn't she know how, given her father and all, but it would be unseemly.  It would be enough to talk about the ghetto, to show sympathy and empathy from afar.  Far be it from her to actually visit the inner city.  Those ghetto mamas would see through her in a minute.  

'You ain't no black woman, honey', one woman yelled at her when she was asked by President Biden to do a walking around tour of Anacostia, Washington, DC's deep inner city. 'Get yo' ass up outta here'.

So on the campaign trail she referred to inclusivity and reminded voters that she was a prime example.  Of what, many asked? She was at best a hodge-podge, a half-black woman whose black side had a lot of white in it, and a half Asian woman, that side being pure Aryan-origin, descended from Mohenjo-Daro.  

But she hammered on about diversity, 'Take me, for example', and then she went on to confabulate and invent, giving the impression that her father was a doobie smoking Rasta man with dreads; but the public wasn't having any of it, so she turned down the volume and upped the stage lights on her female side, 

'I am a proud woman', she said, leaving off the black part.  Give it a rest, her inner circle advised her.  There are more women out there than black people, they said; so at every opportunity she talked of the historic opportunity that awaited America. A woman at the helm of the ship of state.  Imagine! So she channeled Hillary Clinton, but mindful of Hillary's overconfidence and assurance that the historical woman thing would be enough, Kamala sweetened the pot with her more practical credentials.

She had been a virtual pit bull as a prosecutor in California, a take-no-prisoners Hecuba who was relentlessly brutal in the courtroom and who showed the same badgering pursuit in her cross-examination of Brett Kavanagh as a Supreme Court nominee.  Let them see that side of me, she thought, and they will be afraid.  Very afraid, but on second thought the image of a castrating vixen was not what she wanted to sell.  Better stay on the compassionate, generous, concerned path. 

 

It worked. She was President of the United States. 'A sucker is born every minute, you can fool everyone all the time, a fool is easily parted from his money, etc. etc.', caviled the losers, nonplussed that so many Americans fell for this cackling, empty-headed clown; but there she was installed in the Oval Office, surrounded by her cabal of insiders. 

To everyone's surprise there were almost no black faces on her staff or in the Cabinet.  Those few that were there could have passed for white, or close to it, some coffee-mahogany toned upper class blends. 'I am a President for all the people', she said in her Inaugural Address and time and again as she vetted high-level appointments; 'and I am definitely not black', this last bit said to herself in the newly refinished, very feminine boudoir of the Presidential bedroom. 

Although she never admitted it until just now, she had always wanted to be white - really white, not milky black, not Caucasoid Asian white, not mongrel white, but white, pure white.  Being President meant that fungibility was now an option.  A little skin tone lightener here and there, fewer and fewer references to Dr. King, cucumber sandwiches and tea with the DAR ladies from Potomac, and the transformation would be complete. 

 

Mind you, she kept her progressive commitment and backed any and all initiatives to take from the rich and give to the poor black folk in the ghetto; she just didn't need to be black to do it.  Keep them at arms length she believed was good for the country. No favoritism, faux democracy, and this whole pinnacle thing - because of the high spiritual nature of the tribal African and his environmental sensitivity, the black man should be given his proper place atop the pinnacle of human society - had to go.  She ruled over a majority white country and so be it, all proportionality considered. 

No matter how many racial adjustments of America's demography, it would always be a white country - Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Washington were white; England was white, the intellectuals of the Enlightenment and Reformation were white, the pioneers were white, and every successive generation regardless of race bought into, embraced, incorporated the white values of previous generations.  Being the President for all the people mean exactly this - ethos.  

Now, President Harris, no intellectual, did not come to this conclusion through any critical historical analysis or philosophical consideration.  It was simply a good, easy justification for her lifelong desire to shed this faux blackness and ridiculous racial-ethnic charade and become a real American, a white American. 

This was definitely what the progressive Left was expecting, but then history has always shown that the office makes the man, not the other way 'round.  Being President of the United States gave her license - permission to be herself, her own person, and goddamn it, she was going to enjoy being the new me.