Did Kamala Harris Steal Her Childhood Story About Calling for ‘Fweedom’ from MLK? California Sen. Kamala Harris speaks during a drive-in rally Sunday in Savannah, Georgia, ahead of Tuesday's Senate runoff elections. An anecdote Harris told for an interview published in October is drawing new attention for its similarity to a story told by Martin Luther King Jr. for a 1965 interview. (Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
By C. Douglas Golden
Published January 5, 2021 at 6:59am
Kamala Harris doesn’t have to pander to the black community. Really. She’s just making it worse at this point.
Ever since Rep. Tulsi Gabbard dismantled Harris on a debate stage during the Democratic primary in 2019 for Harris’ record as a prosecutor — with the implication she was behind “mass incarceration,” a big no-no with black voters — Harris has made sure to emphasize her African-American bona fides in ways that can be painful to see, at least for this white person watching Harris make faux pas like naming the very dead Tupac Shakur as the “best rapper alive.”
It’s little things like this that make it surprising no one paid attention to an anecdote that led off an obsequious October Elle Magazine profile of Harris, then still on the campaign trail with Joe Biden.
“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,” writer Ashley C. Ford’s profile began.
“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.”
“This past August, that same precocious child, now a member of the U.S. Senate, stood on a stage in a nearly empty auditorium flanked by American flags and accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president, making history as the first Black and Indian American woman to do so.”
You’ve read this article before even if you haven’t — stories about how Harris is a gritty go-getter for fweedom, swimming against the intersecting tides of being black, Indian and female.
For example, take this interaction between Ford and Harris, dear reader, and try not to laugh:
“With political corruption and police brutality top of mind today, it can be hard to believe there’s a powerful defender ready to battle for all of this country’s people at once. None of us can tell the future, so we look for clues, and try to pose the right questions,” Ford wrote. “I ask what justice means to a prosecutor who wants to defend our civil rights. The senator says, smiling, ‘It’s about freedom, it’s about equality, it’s about dignity. When you achieve equality, and freedom, and fairness, it’s not because I grant it to you. It’s because you fought for it because it is your right. This is not about benevolence or charity; it is about every human being’s God-given right. What do we collectively do to fight for that? That’s what justice represents to me — it’s about empowerment of the people.’”
At this point, one assumes, Ford stood up and began slow-clapping.
Anyhow, these kind of anti-adversarial political interviews pop up in magazines of a certain bent all the time, and nobody pays too much attention to them. In this case, perhaps someone should have — particularly an editor or fact-checker at Elle Magazine, say — considering the inspiring anecdote that led off the story sounds almost exactly the same as one told by the most famous leader of the civil rights movement to arguably the most famous chronicler of the civil rights movement:
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Poster Comment:
Plagiarism now Kamala? Really?