Misleading: Kamala Harris' Slaveowner Ancestors

Misbar’s investigation found that Harris’s father, Donald Harris, wrote an essay on his family history in Jamaica Global Online. In the essay, he says that his 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).” While there is no official documentation proving this, Donald Harris's statement was the seed for the claims that Kamala Harris is descended from slaveowners.

However, it is historically inaccurate to take that statement and then claim that Harris is descended from slaveowners in a way that implies she has somehow benefitted from their actions. 

It is true that Irish-born Brown enslaved people in Jamaica. If Harris’s great-grandmother Miss Chrishy was descended from Brown, though (which has not been definitively proven), it is almost certainly due to rape. According to Jamaican professor of history Sasha Turner, “rape was part of the everyday experience of slavery.” The Atlantic concurs: “The overwhelming majority of African Americans have white male ancestors, largely because of white male slave owners who raped Black female slaves.” This is supported by extensive scholarship from a variety of sources. Since “female slaves had no legal right to refuse unwanted sexual advances,” claiming that Harris benefits from slaveowner ancestry is analogous to claiming that the descendants of Sally Hemmings benefit from their relationship to Thomas Jefferson. 

Further, “regardless of their white paternity, children born to enslaved women inherited their mothers’ status as slaves” in both the U.S. and Jamaica, negating any possible benefit Harris is implied to have received from being possibly descended from a slaveowner.

Finally, the user who posted on Gab about the Washington Post article on Tim Scott’s ancestry appears not to have read it. The article does not decry Scott for having a slaveowner ancestor. Rather, it clarifies comments that Scott has made about his grandfather, who he says had to leave school to pick cotton. The Washington Post discovered that Artis Ware was the son of Lawrence Ware, a landowner who had some independence from white sharecropper culture. Artis Ware worked on his father's farm.

Since the claim that Kamala Harris is descended from slaveowners fails to take the historical situation into account, and since there is a false equivalency between Harris's ancestry and Scott's, we rate this claim as misleading.