I wonder where she stands on the forthcoming election. After all, I say, America could be on the verge of voting in its first black female president, Kamala Harris.
“Well, you know what they supposedly said?” she asks me. “She’s not black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian.”
She looks at me expectantly, perhaps assuming that I have Indian heritage.
“Well, she’s both,” I offer.
“Her father’s white. That’s what I was told. I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days,” she coughs. “I was told that they discovered her father was white.”
I’m floored at this point. It’s well known that Harris’s father is a Jamaican economist, a Stanford professor who split from her Indian mother when she was five. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” Harris wrote in her book The Truths We Hold.
The people who are most vocal in questioning the facts of Harris’s identity tend to be hardcore QAnon-adjacent, Trump-loving conspiracy theorists. I don’t think Jackson falls into that camp, but I do wonder what the algorithms are serving her.
Poor Janet Jackson. Lost one of her big brothers recently, apparently lost her brain at some point too. This comes from a Guardian article obviously intended to celebrate an impending comeback, but… well, it’s become notable now mostly for this exchange. You may notice the URL has certain differences to the article headline quoted here, as if they were trying to not highlight that detail or something, but too late… I mean, with all due respect to her, one of her brothers was this guy. You’re not really the ideal person to be accusing a black woman of not actually being black, Janet…