A Lineage Primer for the Newbies

An explanation of the lineage framework and why it's necessary, using Kamala Harris and Barack Obama as examples....

More Is Better

Video has its benefits, but so does the written word, which brings me here to Substack. I can’t expect everyone to find the video that explains the origin story of the American Descendants of Slavery movement, our agenda, or some of the beliefs that undergird my own personal politics. So…. I’ll write it. —yc

Flat Blackness

Our collective confusion over race is most acutely observed in the previous debate over whether Kamala Harris can lay claim to Blackness. Black Americans are the base of the Democratic Party, and Harris—like Obama before her—attempted to connect to Black Americans through race, as a kind of substitute for policy and a cheat code for winning our vote. Whereas Obama’s claim to Blackness came through his Kenyan father, Harris’s connection to Blackness comes through her Jamaican father. Neither Obama nor Harris has any ties to the legacy of American chattel slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, convict leasing, or sharecropping.

Harris’s supporters claimed that the connective tissue tying her to Black Americanness was strengthened by her having attended Howard University, an HBCU and my alma mater. But how can Harris’s education be her bona fides when, according to the Census Bureau, only 22.6% of Blacks aged 25 or older have a bachelor's degree or higher? Are those ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) who didn’t attend college less Black American than Harris because she pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) and they didn’t? Does her four-year experience at an HBCU outweigh their multigenerational, systemic oppression and the accrued disadvantages anchored in American chattel slavery?

Harris’s years at Howard University are a mere snapshot of her life. Another, less celebrated snapshot from her life are her high school years in the Canadian suburbs. Like Obama, who attended the privileged Punahou High School in Hawaii, Harris attended Westmount High, an area that, according to The New York Times, is “home to many of Westmount’s wealthy students.”

Contrast the early elite experiences of Kamala Devi Harris and Barack Hussein Obama with the average ADOS teenager, and the illusion of racial sameness crumbles under the weight of truth. American anti-ADOS racism is multigenerational, intentional, and unrelenting in how it has institutionalized this country’s racial caste. We are not just behind in a footrace against white people and other immigrant groups. We are the shoes that white people wore in that race and are now seeking to toss in the garbage.

During the Selma voting rights march in Alabama in 2007, candidate Obama gave a speech using the contrived accent of an ADOS Southern preacher, where he tried to lay the differences between ADOS and Black immigrants aside:

My very existence might not have been possible had it not been for some of the folks here today. I mentioned at the Unity Breakfast that a lot of people been asking, well, you know, your father was from Africa, your mother, she's a white woman from Kansas. I'm not sure that you have the same experience.

And I tried to explain, you don't understand. You see, my grandfather was a cook to the British in Kenya. Grew up in a small village and all his life, that's all he was—a cook and a house boy. And that's what they called him, even when he was 60 years old. They called him a house boy. They wouldn't call him by his last name.

Sound familiar?

Here, Obama’s dishonesty came by way of omission. Obama mentioned his Kenyan grandfather, but never his parents or his white grandparents. Obama’s father—Barack Obama Sr.—attended Harvard, allowing Barack Obama Jr. to enter Harvard as a legacy student. Prior, Obama Jr. got into Punahou because his white grandfather pulled some strings on his behalf. Nothing about the parts of Obama’s life that built his success sounds familiar to ADOS.

And if that wasn’t enough, Obama poured it on even thicker in tying himself to ADOS lineage:

There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks were willing to march across a bridge. So they got together, and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm not coming home to Selma, Alabama.

I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me. I stand on the shoulders of giants.

At that moment, Obama committed the ultimate offense: He laid claim to a heritage that doesn’t belong to him. Obama is here because of ADOS. Although it is true that the Civil Rights Act led to the Immigration Act of 1965, which cleared the way for people like Obama’s Kenyan father to come to America and study at elite colleges like Harvard, Obama Sr. is not one of us, and neither is his son. Both father and son owe activists who crossed that Selma bridge, but neither is a part of our historic, multigenerational experience in America. That bridge—that movement—is solely the inheritance of the descendants of this country’s enslaved people.

Kamala Harris attempted a similar kind of forced teaming when she said in her memoir that her mother sat her and her sister down and told them that they were Black, as if her mother’s declaration transformed her Indian/Jamaican lineage into ADOS lineage.

Not only are Obama and Harris in no way representative of our oppressed ADOS lineage, but they are, in fact, the tools that White America uses to mask the failure that stems from our oppression. The tie that binds the descendants of American chattel slavery is wealthlessness.

After slavery, our ancestors were promised freedom along with 40 acres and a mule. We were promised the opportunity to start anew. Instead, we got slavery by another name. Physical chains were replaced by economic chains. The solution that America settled on for solving the “Negro problem” was not redress, but deceit. America committed itself to avoiding the work of repair required after enslaving us for 246 years, then abandoning us to white mobs and Dixiecrats, rendering us locked out of American opportunity.

An Easy Fix? Trickery

America’s racialized caste depends on ADOS remaining at the bottom to eat America’s failure—i.e., predatory loans, mass incarceration, pollution, etc. Since there has been little progress for ADOS, America imported Black and Brown people from around the world to represent an ascension that never happened. America’s first Black President and first Black Vice President are part of a group of symbolic Black firsts that are intended to represent progress for Black Americans but, in fact, represent our replacements:

• First Black Secretary of State: Colin Powell – Jamaican-American.

• First Black Attorney General: Eric Holder – Barbadian-American.

• First Black woman President of Harvard Law Review: Nigerian-American.

• First Black editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar: Lebanese-Trinidadian.

• First Black woman to lead the Harvard Crimson: Chinese-Haitian.

• First Black woman to have her own prime-time cable news show: Congolese-Guyanese.

• First Black President of Harvard: Haitian-American.

Disproportionately affluent Black immigrants who emigrated to America voluntarily—as opposed to being involuntarily carried here on slave ships—became the face of a fake multiracial meritocracy. Their only connection to ADOS came through the aesthetics of race—melanin and, in Obama’s case, kinky hair.

And so the ADOS movement serves as an unmasking of America and the tactics it uses to mask our systemic oppression and fasten us to the bottom. I will not only outline the racist plunder that we have endured since 1619, but also explain how it hides in plain sight and who benefits. Lastly, I will make the case for redress in the form of reparations and a transformative Black agenda.

Thank you for joining me on this journey!

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