Biden picks Black(ish) woman as running mate

It's official! Slow Joe Biden has done what was expected, nay demanded, and chosen a woman of colour [not "person" of colour? Ed.] as his running mate for the 2020 election.

She is Kamala Devi Harris, born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland CA. What follows is based on the Wikipedia article about her. Read on and learn why any comparison with Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who made false claims about being black, is odious and, errr, racist.

Ms Harris's mother, Shyamala Gopalan, emigrated from India in 1960 to pursue a doctorate in endocrinology at UC Berkeley. Her father, Donald Harris, is a Stanford University Emeritus Professor of Economics, who emigrated from Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study in economics at UC Berkeley. So much that is absolutely right... make that left... in the Excited States of America comes out of Berkeley.

Ms Harris self-identifies as African-American -- the lamestream media are already adding "and Asian-American too!" -- and "considers her experience to be American." She spent her early years Berkeley, where she grew up going to a black Baptist church and a Hindu temple. And her parents divorced when she was seven. How American is that!

She and her sister visited their mother's family in India. They also used to visit their father in Palo Alto CA on weekends, where neighbours' kids were not allowed to play with them because they were black.

When she was 12, Ms Harris and her sister moved with their mother to Montréal, Canada, where one presumes the family found more acceptance than in the other CA. Ms Harris was a popular student at the English-language high school in the toney Anglo enclave of Westmount, from which she graduated in 1981. She went on to Howard University, a private, federally chartered "historically black" university in Washington DC, from which she received a B.A. in political science and economics in 1986.

After interning with Senator Alan Cranston (D-CA), Ms Harris earned her J.D. from the Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and passed the bar of California in 1990. She was immediately hired as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County CA, where she was noted as being "an able prosecutor on the way up." Or perhaps she was going down.

By 1994, Ms Harris had entered into a relationship with Willie Lewis Brown Jr., a Democratic politician who became Speaker of the California Assembly, the first African-American to hold that office. It was he who appointed Ms Harris to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and later the California Medical Assistance Commission. Thus the origin of the scurrilous (but factual) meme at the left.

Perhaps we'd better stop there, before we get to the late John Lewis. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. My point is that when you see these snarky memes -- and you'll be seeing a lot of them -- you mustn't assume that they're all "fake news", created by anti-black racists and/or Republicans. Where there's smoke, etc.

That said, Ms Harris ticks all the right boxes on the Democrats' checklist. She's a woman, although evidently heterosexual. And she's Black, or brown, or at least non-white. She's from immigrant stock, but not the kind that came over on the Mayflower. She's from California, so that locks up both the la-la-liberals and the Hollywood liberals. She doesn't have the political baggage of Susan Rice.

And did I already say she's black(ish)? But... this is key... she doesn't look or sound as black as, say, Lori Lightfoot, Keisha Bottoms or Stacey Abrams. How could Sleepy Joe have done any better?!

Further reading: "Stacey Abrams Graciously Accepts VP Nomination", Babylon Bee, 11/8/20.