California Sen. Kamala Harris is one of the top candidates for the presidential nomination of the Democrat in 2020.
She has been one of the main proponents of giving reparations to the descendants of slaves with taxpayer funds.
But now a profound, dark secret from the past of her family might return to haunt her platform and campaign. And it emerges from the hands of the dad of Harris who has once again become a thorn in the side of the aspirations of his own daughter.
“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town) and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me),” her dad, David J. Harris said in an op ed in Jamaica Global Online.
He continued – “The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural ‘produce’ exporter (mostly pimento or all-spice), who died in 1939 one year after I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town (and where, as a child, I learned the catechism, was baptized and confirmed, and served as an acolyte),”
“Looking back now I can say, with certainty and all due credit to Miss Iris, that it was this early intimate exposure to operation of the sugar industry at the local level of small-scale production with family labour and free wage-labour, coupled with my growing curiosity about how these things came to be, that led me, once I started reading about the history of Jamaica, to a closer study of the sugar industry,” Harris said.
“I came then to understand its origin as a system of global production and commerce, based on slave labour, with Jamaica as a key component of that system from its very start,” he said.
If Harris wishes to pay the offspring of slaves reparation, she has a great chance to put her own money where her mouth is.
She can begin by writing checks that her family owned and worked on their own plantations to the offspring of the Jamaican slaves.
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