At the Democratic debate, Joe Biden was listing his accomplishments with the black community and said that he received support from the only black woman elected to the US Senate.

Of course, he was jumped on for ignoring that Kamala Harris was also elected to the US Senate.

This may have been Joe’s senility.

Or it may have been a Kinsley gaffe, which is “when a political gaffe reveals some truth that a politician did not intend to admit.”

I think Biden is right about something, Kamala Harris is and isn’t black.

Biologically speaking, yes, her father is of African descent.  I’m not arguing that.

Her mother was an Indian immigrant of the Brahmin caste, which is the highest caste in Hindu.    She received her doctorate from UC Berkeley and was a cancer researcher with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Her father was an immigrant from Jamaica, who earned his doctorate from UC Berkeley and taught in the UC Berkeley and Stanford economics department.  He was also a Fulbright Scholar.

Harris herself was born in Oakland in 1964 after the Civil Rights Act was passed.

So implicit in all of this is the question “what does it mean to be ‘black’ politically?'”

Harris’s family were not sharecroppers in the South.  Her family never fled north to escape Jim Crow and Segregation.  They were not affected by redlining.

She doesn’t share in any of the experiences of Black American culture.

So by lived experience, Harris is practically white.  The daughter of two Berkeley Ph.D.s, she’s more privileged than the vast majority of white people.

Cory Booker’s parents were executives for IBM, so he grew up privileged, but at the verst least, his dad experienced segregation as a child in South Carolina.

Perhaps this is why Harris doesn’t get much support from the black community.  Maybe they can tell that she has virtually nothing in common with them but her skin tone.

Honestly, I see this as good news.  It might be the beginning of the end for some of the Left’s racial haranguing.

Take the case of Colin Kaepernick.  He can wear a Kunta Kinte jersey to practice, but he can’t escape the fact that he was raised by white adoptive parents in the upper-middle class, predominately white, suburb of Turlock, California.  He was a 4.0 student and all-around athlete recruited to play for the Chicago Cubs before deciding to play football.  So by lived experience, he’s a privileged white man playing at being an oppressed African American.

Only white Progressives and professional grievance mongers are supporting Colin Kaepernick anymore.  His antics have gotten stale with everyone else.

This is going to more and more relevant on elite college campuses.  Does the Legacy black student at an Ivy League, born to rich Ivy League parents get to claim the victim status of a poor sharecropper because of the color of their skin if all he or she has ever known is private schools and the inside of BMW’s?

I think some people are getting sick of the answer to that question being “yes, of course.”