Her grandparents 'must be turning in their grave': Kamala Harris' Jamaican Stanford professor...

Daily Mail ^ | 20 Feb 19 | DAVID MARTOSKO

[sphinx]

I trust Republican opposition research sleuths will find this out. But with any luck, the dems will beat them to the punch. I’d like to see how it impacts KH’s numbers in Democrat primaries if she turns out to be the pothead prosecutor who was sending the neighborhood traffickers to prison. She might not make it out of Chicago alive.

[avenir]

Amen.

[SERKIT]

:::::Harris graduated from Howard University in 1986 and finished law school in 1989. The two rappers didn't release albums to the public until 1993 and 1991.:::::

:::::By then, the future senator was a prosecutor in the Alameda County, California District Attorney's office. She served in that office for eight years.:::::

I believe she accidentally revealed the truth that she's been on the chronic for MANY years and truthfully stated she listened to the two rappers while twisting up a hog leg while she was a prosecutor.

[SERKIT]

:::::Shame on her for pandering to the lowest elements and stereotypes in black culture for some cheap political acceptance.:::::

She should have pandered by whipping out a bottle of hot sauce, like Hillary, along with a contrived ghetto accent. Now THAT's some pandering.

[Louis Foxwell]

European, I believe Spanish. Great granddad was a plantation slave owner in Jamaica. Her family has always been in the 1%. They are very snobby elitists.

[Brown Deer]

Like 0bama, Kamala’s ancestors were slaveowners.

[mund1011]

“But did she inhale?”

Better question is - Did she swallow?

[LucyT]

****

PING.

Like 0bama, Kamala’s ancestors were slaveowners.

Thanks, Brown Deer. Did they also smoke pot?

[Brown Deer]

Actually, her father is very disappointed in her!

He says, “My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics. Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”

[vetvetdoug]

I read on FB before it was deleted that the only true black that was in Kamala Harris was when she was banging Willie Brown....SMH...

[Brown Deer]

Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown's Town) was the grandmother of Kamala's father Donald, and is shown below standing in front of the home at Orange Hill.

She died in 1951 at the age of 62 and was the wife of Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural 'produce' exporter, who died in 1939 one year after Donald Harris was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town.

Hamilton Brown born in County Antrim, Ireland, was a member of the House of Assembly of Jamaica in 1820 and represented Saint Ann Parish in that assembly for 22 years. In 1832, he met Henry Whiteley on his trip to Jamaica to whom he argued that Jamaican slaves were better off than the poor of England and therefore the British government should not interfere with the way the Jamaican planters managed their slaves; Whiteley went on to witness harsh and arbitrary whipping of slaves at the plantations that he visited during his stay.

Brown died on 18 September 1843 and is buried in the graveyard of St Mark’s Anglican church in Brown's Town, as is Joseph Alexander Harris.

[LucyT]

***

PING

Begin at # 29 and read through # 31; see photos.

Thanks, Brown Deer.

[Fred Nerks]

So she’s IRISH! It figures. Full of Blarney.

[Brown Deer]

Looks like Christiana Brown was never Mrs. Chrishy Harris, she was only Miss Chrishy Brown, the mother of Joseph Alexander Harris's son Oscar, who was the father of Donald J. Harris (Kamala's father).

Death certificate of Joseph Alexander Harris, bachelor, merchant, age 65, 11 August 1939:


Death certificate of Christiana Brown, spinster, seamstress, age 70, 11 June 1951:


Birth certificate of Oscar Joseph Harris aka Oscar Wilde, 5 April 1914, name corrected on 12 Dec 1950:

[kalee]

Her father must not be too happy with her relationship with Willie Brown either.

[Brown Deer]

Maybe it’s uncle Willie Brown ;-)

[Fred Nerks]

Reflections of a Jamaican Father

By Donald J. Harris

As a child growing up in Jamaica, I often heard it said, by my parents and family friends: “memba whe yu cum fram”. To this day, I continue to retain the deep social awareness and strong sense of identity which that grassroots Jamaican philosophy fed in me. As a father, I naturally sought to develop the same sensibility in my two daughters. Born and bred in America, Kamala was the first in line to have it planted. Maya came two years later and had the advantage of an older sibling as mentor. It is for them to say truthfully now, not me, what if anything of value they carried from that early experience into adulthood. My one big regret is that they did not come to know very well the two most influential women in my life: “Miss Chrishy” and “Miss Iris” (as everybody called them). This is, in many ways, a story about these women and the heritage they gave us.

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). 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).

Both of my grandmothers had the strongest influence on my early upbringing(“not to exclude, of course, the influence of my dear mother”Miss Beryl” and loving father “Maas Oscar”).

Miss Chrishy was the disciplinarian, reserved and stern in look, firm with ‘the strap’, but capable of the most endearing and genuine acts of love, affection, and care.

Miss Chrishy dressed up in her usual finery, standing in front of the home at Orange Hill, St Ann parish where I spent my early years

She sparked my interest in economics and politics simply by my observing and listening to her in her daily routine.

She owned and operated the popular ‘dry-goods store’ on the busy main street leading away from the famous market in the centre of Brown’s Town. Every day after school, I would go to her shop to wait for the drive home to Orange Hill after she closed the shop. It was here that she was in her groove, while engaged in lively and sometimes intense conversation with all who came into the shop about issues of the day.

Business was front and centre for her, a profession and a family tradition that she embodied and carried with purpose, commitment, pride, and dignity (next to her devotion to the church that, as she often said, her ancestor built). She never paid much attention to the business of the farm at Orange Hill. Her sons took care of that side of the family business. Her constant focus was on issues that affected her business of buying and selling imported ‘dry goods’ as well as the cost of living, issues that required understanding and keeping up with the news – a task which she pursued with gusto. She was also fully in charge of ‘domestic affairs’ in our home and, of course, had raised eight children of her own at an earlier age.

There was a daily diet of politics as well. She was a great admirer of ‘Busta’ (Sir William Alexander Bustamante, then Chief Minister in the colonial government and leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). She claimed, with conviction and pride, to be a “Labourite” (as members of the JLP were called) and for the interesting reason that, as she argued, “labour is at the heart of everything in life”. Little did I know then, what I learned later in studying economics, that my grandmother was espousing her independently discovered version of a Labour Theory of Value!

Her philanthropic side shone through every Easter and Christmas when she had my sister Enid and me package bun and cheese (a favourite Jamaican Easter fare) and other goodies in little boxes that we carried and delivered to families living in the area around our home.

She died in 1951 at the age of 62. Her departure left me, then only fourteen, with a deep sense of sadness and loss.

Miss Iris, mother of eight children too, was the sweetest and gentlest person one could meet, but underneath it was a tough farming woman who ran the cane farm at Thatch Walk (near Aenon Town) jointly owned with her husband “Mr Christie”. She was always ready to go to church on Sunday to preach and teach about the “Revelations” she saw approaching the world at that time (during and after World War II) in accord with the Bible.

I spent summers with her, roaming around the cane field, fascinated by the mechanical operation of cane ‘juicing’ by the old method (a wooden pole extended out from the grinding machine and tied to a mule walking round and round to grind the cane), and eager to drink a cup of the juice caught directly from the juice flowing into the vat to be boiled and crystallized as ‘raw sugar’. No Coke or Pepsi could beat the taste of that fresh cane juice!

It was a joy and a learning experience for me to hang out with the workers on the cane farm, see them wield a ‘cutlass’ (the machete) with such flourish and finesse, listen to their stories of exploits (some too x-rated for me to repeat), and sit with them as they prepared their meal by putting everything in one big ‘Dutch’ pot, cooking it over an open fire in the field and serving it out on a big banana leaf for all of us to eat sitting there.

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. 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.

Miss Iris died in 1981 at the grand old age of 93 and I grieved over the loss of someone so dear and close to me. She is shown here in photo (taken by me in 1966), just back from church, proudly holding in her lap little Kamala, and confident in her firm prediction even then of the future achievements of her great-granddaughter (after giving her ‘blessings’ by making a cross with her finger on the child’s forehead).

https://www.jamaicaglobalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2.-Miss-Iris-with-her-greatgranddaughter-Kamala--Donald-J-1024x755.jpg Source

[Brown Deer]

RADICAL ECONOMIST — Visiting Economics Prof. Donald Harris addresses public meeting Jan. 18 on student requests for a "formal commitment" by the department to establishing a field in radical political economics. His pending departure — and the likelihood no new Marxian economist will be hired — form the basis for some of the student complaints.

Harris Departure Stirs Turmoil
Econ Dept. Loses Radical Prof

The Stanford Daily, Volume 164, Issue 71, 25 January 1974

By STEPHEN CARTER

Opinions differ on causes of and solutions to program disputes currently plaguing the Economics Department. The controversies primarily concern student requests that the department make a firmer commitment to a program in radical political economics.

Student dissatisfaction with current department programs in Marxist economics, and with limited faculty trained in the field, has been exacerbated by the pending departure of visiting professor Donald Harris, one of two Marxian economists currently in the department. The other is John Gurley.

According to Economics Department Chairman Moses Abramovitz, the most recent student requests came in the form of petitions drafted by the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) chapter here, signed by 208 undergraduate and over 50 graduate students from various departments, and delivered to the department shortly before Christmas.

Department members met with interested students to discuss these problems at a public meeting a week ago. A meeting concentrating on the undergraduate aspects of the problem will be held at 2:30 on Feb. 1 in TMU 270.

Radical Field
The petitions contained three requests: that the department make a "formal commitment" to its program in Marxian economics; that it support this field by maintaining a staff of three economists — a full professor, an associate professor, and an assistant professor — "working in and sympathetic to" the field; and that the faculty recommend offering Harris a full-time position.

But although Gurley termed the Harris departure "a very serious loss," and several students indicated a desire that he stay, the chances of the latter appear slim.

"I've had several talks with him [Harris], and I believe that we are in agreement on the general conditions under which he would like to be considered," explained Abramovitz. He further noted the conditions deal with "a positive faculty commitment in Marxian economics," and agreed under such conditions Harris "might emerge as a leading candidate for appointment."

He added, however, "these conditions don't yet exist. They're exactly the issues that are now before the faculty." The faculty meets today to consider the requests.

Harris Return Unlikely
Harris, who returns after this year to a tenured position at the University of Wisconsin, admitted chances of his remaining are slim. "I have no great anxiety or desire to remain here," he confessed, adding he hasn't "been terribly excited at Stanford."

He explained he "would like to see serious intellectual or scholarly interest here [at Stanford] consistent with my own interests," although adding "the possibility doesn't exist here at the moment." Harris, a black, further explained he desired "to link up with serious research" of black scholars applying system analysis to problems of blacks throughout the world, but "the University is not prepared to develop that." He has not been approached about remaining here, he concluded.

The question of the department's "commitment" to a broader program in Marxian economics also evoked varied responses. Abramovitz noted the department had established a "graduate field" in radical political economics on a trial basis in response to URPE requests last year.

Graduate students in the department must pass comprehensive examinations in three to five such "fields" before receiving a degree, and Abramovitz pointed out "a certain tentative air" always surrounds new fields.

He explained the department had emphasized the trial nature of the field, because it had been established after student requests, and the department hadn't wanted the students to feel there was "an unalterable commitment" to it.

Abramovitz Hesitant
But although he admitted "student interest" and its "importance" as "part of a liberal education justify at least some additional offerings," Abramovitz maintained the department needed more experience before it could consider hiring additional faculty.

But Harris doesn't "regard Marxian economics as a field: it's a series of ideas which permeate the whole structure of economics."

Abramovitz confessed there seemed little likelihood of hiring full-time faculty. Abramovitz explained two professors would possibly be half of all the faculty to be hired in the next two years. If student interest warrants more faculty, he continued, a visitor would be located. But he didn't consider one quarter sufficient experience, he said.

Further, he called the proposed criterion of "working in and sympathetic to Marxian economics" a "dangerous" one. He called Marxism in part "a political ideology," adding "demands for an ideologically or politically balanced faculty are likely to follow." But Gurley and Harris both criticized this reasoning.

[easternsky]

Thank you much for the info, very enlightning

[wardaddy]

Amazing her daddy eschews identity politics ....he’s a mulatto Jamaican with a PhD

Privileged as they’d say

In my days there on the arm of Miss Desnoes and Geddes at Trident Villas or the Jamaica Inn

Jamaican white didn’t mean exactly skin color