Presumed Vice President-elect Kamala Harris apparently has a more storied past than Joe Biden, although like Biden, she had to steal a key story about it from another prominent political figure.
In 1987, Biden ripped off British Labour leader Neil Kinnock’s biography to embellish a weak resume during his first run for president. That falsehood and other revelations about plagiarism ended the run.
Late last year, Elle magazine peddled a fanciful tale about Harris declaring herself four-square for “fweedom” during a civil rights rally in 1960s. And last week, Harris fondly recalled childhood Kwanzaa celebrations at a time when few Americans, if any, knew about the made-up holiday.
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I Want “Fweedom”
The “let-fweedom-wing” story, obviously lifted from Alex Haley’s Playboy interview with Martin Luther King, Jr., is the opening scene in Elle’s profile of Harris in October:
Senator Kamala Harris started her life’s work young. She laughs from her gut, the way you would with family, as she remembers being wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller with no straps with her parents and her uncle. At some point, she fell from the stroller (few safety regulations existed for children’s equipment back then), and the adults, caught up in the rapture of protest, just kept on marching. By the time they noticed little Kamala was gone and doubled back, she was understandably upset. “My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing,” Harris says, “and she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”
The story’s subheadline reads this way: “The woman who will become vice president on the fight for justice and freedom she’s been waging since birth.”
Harris has been waging war for “justice and freedom … since birth?”
The story is a little suspicious, alert critics found, because it sounded familiar.
They traced the story to Haley. Like King, who plagiarized his doctoral thesis at Boston University and even his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Haley plagiarized Roots, the fanciful tale of his slave ancestors.
Be that as it may, Haley’s interview with King included a tale that sounds an awful lot like Harris’.
“You are now the universally acknowledged leader of the American civil rights movement, and chief spokesman for the nation’s 20,000,000 Negroes,” Haley said to open the last question of the interview. “Are there ever moments when you feel awed by this burden of responsibility, or inadequate to its demands?”
King replied at length, and included the now-droll observations that he “subject[s] myself to self-purification and endless self-analysis,” as well as endless soul-searching, to ensure that “I am holding fast to my ideals.” Whether those “ideals” included watching and laughing as another minister raped a woman — an accusation made against King — we are not given to know, but that aside, King then told Haley the “Fee-dom” story.
At least the little girl in King’s tale was seven or eight years old, and not a child small enough to have fallen out of a stroller.
Twitter users, appropriately enough, laughed:
Others piled on the ridicule.
Kamala’s Kwanzaa Days
Readers can decide whether Harris uttered that plea for “fweedom,” just as they can evaluate the tale about her family’s Kwanzaa parties in the mid 1960s.
On Twitter, Harris explained that she and her family will celebrate the fake holiday differently this year — by Zoom!
And then came this memory of Kwanzaas long, long ago:
You know, my sister and I, we grew up celebrating Kwanzaa. Every year, our family would — and our extended family, we would gather around, across multiple generations, and we’d tell stories. The kids would sit on the carpet and the elders would sit in chairs, and we would light the candles, and of course, afterwards have a beautiful meal. And, of course, there was always the discussion of the seven principles. And my favorite, I have to tell you, was always the one about self-determination, kujichagulia.
And, you know, essentially it’s about be and do. Be the person you want to be, and do the things you want to do, and do the things that need to be done. It’s about not letting anyone write our future for us, but instead going out and writing it for ourselves. And that principle motivates me today, as we seek to confront the challenges facing our country and to build a brighter future for all Americans. So, to everyone who is celebrating, Happy Kwanzaa from our family to yours.
The hokum was obvious. As with the “fweedom” story, hilarity ensued.
Born in 1964, Harris was just 2 years old when black supremacist Maulana Karenga — born Ronald McKinley Everett and convicted of beating and torturing two women — invented the Marxist “holiday” in 1966. Few people if any “celebrated” it. Few do now.
A photo of Harris and her sister when they were children shows Christmas trees in the background. They were, the caption said, “Sisters waiting for Santa Claus.”
