I’ve been reading the thunderous reactions to Donald Trump’s statement that Kamala Harris became opportunistically black when it suited her political purposes. Otherwise, this politician, Trump suggests, would have been content to identify more fully with her Indian ancestry.

This statement, as Miranda Devine notes, is really about Kamala “running away from everything else about her past from the radical left positions she has always espoused, to her racial identity, once Indian, now black, as Trump pointed out.” Mentioning this fact, according to Devine, brought “outrage from the usual suspects.”

As it turned out, Trump may have misspoken because Harris, I would guess from her PR pitches over the years, has happily played both the black and Indian cards, depending on which was more useful at any given moment in her career. She is now playing to perfection the prom queen card, which the MSM has handed her, and which exempts her from ever having to defend her wacky leftist political stands in a past that the same media have now obligingly erased or fundamentally reconstructed.

 The larger point made by Devine and by Matt Boose on at Chronicles is of course correct. Kamala Harris has no fixed identity other than her career as a leftist minority celebrity-victim, the details of which she’s been free to change with media assistance. In this respect, she’s like Al Sharpton, the Obamas, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and other media darlings, who have been able to change their stands or obliterate no longer useful aspects of their past, with lots of outside help.

In Harris’s case, I have to wonder about the attendees at the National Association of Black Journalists, who found Trump’s refusal to recognize Harris’s blackness to be “disgusting.”

The neoconservative Wall Street Journal was similarly upset that Trump would even dare to make such an outrageous assertion. Allow me to confess that if Harris had not insisted that she was black and if the MSM had not provided this fact, I might never have arrived at that conclusion. I would have taken Harris for a darker-skinned, part Indian, but essentially white woman married to a very liberal, effeminate Jewish attorney from Los Angeles.

She is certainly not as recognizably black as Clarence Thomas, who perhaps those blacks who attended the banshee-like assault on Donald Trump by embattled black feminists on Tuesday would be less happy to recognize as one of their own. What about Dr. Ben Carson? Is he as black as Barack Obama, who is only half black but much more popular among American black voters than the Detroit native who rose from poverty to become a distinguished surgeon. I won’t even ask about the very black-looking Florida congressman Byron Donalds, who is a conservative, not leftist, firebrand. I doubt those attendees who found Trump’s comments to be unutterably “disgusting” would have reacted with outrage if somebody questioned Donalds’ “real” blackness. 

Part of what now defines blackness is holding leftist political views. What made Trump’s questioning of Harris’s blackness so “disgusting” is that he attacked the racial claims of a quintessential leftist politician who was appealing to blacks in a tight presidential contest. The attendees who appeared disgusted would probably not have reacted in quite the same way if someone disputed Clarence Thomas’s race. The point is that those who were ostentatiously offended by Trump’s statement (which admittedly could have been more artfully expressed) were indeed, as Devine described them, “the usual suspects.”

They were also, like the “journalist” from ABC who came out in her first question hissing and flailing maliciously at Trump, hardly open to persuasion. Those who chose to be profoundly offended were likely strong supporters of Harris for ideological reasons. They cheer her on as a “black woman” precisely because she’s playing the black and feminist race cards. Hadn’t Harris shown how black she was by denouncing the U.S. as an inherently racist country? She also took a conspicuous stand for releasing mostly black criminal offenders without bail, even if in another incarnation, as California’s attorney general, she filled the state’s prisons with black drug offenders.

Running around trying to get violent black criminals released from jail without bail and expressing support for BLM has not kept Harris from simultaneously identifying with female power. She is manic about abortion rights everywhere and for everybody. She’s also for hiring preferences for women, along with rewarding other approved victims.  But here too, as Devine explains, she’s not entirely consistent: “From the party that gave us ‘What is a woman?’ Supreme Court picks, it’s hardly surprising that Kamala backs men in women’s sports and boys in girls’ lockers.”   Of course, that may also be what “blackness” is now about, backing the entire package of woke leftist positions, even the ones that contradict other ones.