How Kamala Harris ‘descended’ from Ireland’s most notorious slave owner

As Kamala Harris hit back at Donald Trump’s attack she ‘turned black’, British and American historians clashed over a ‘twisted attempt to weaponize’ the vice president’s family tree.

Kamala Harris changed her strategy in responding to Donald Trump’s claims she “turned black” as she embraced identity politics during their firey clash a the US presidential debate.

Asked why it was appropriate to comment on Ms Harris’ racial identity, Mr Trump said he “doesn’t care” whether or not Ms Harris had “turned black”.

“I don’t care what she is,” Mr Trump said about the remarks, before adding “All I can say is I read where she was not Black — that she put out — and I’ll say that. And then I read that she was Black, and that’s okay.”

Instead of brushing it aside as she did during her CNN interview – when she said “next question, please”, Ms Harris responded with Mr Trump’s history of targeting race, including the “Birtherism” conspiracy against Barack Obama.

“I think it’s a tragedy we have someone who wants to be a president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide people,” she said.

The question of the Ms Harris’ family tree was thrust into the spotlight when Mr Trump claimed she “happened to turn black”, after previously embracing her Indian and Jamaican heritage.

Her mother Shyamala Gopalan and father Donald J. Harris immigrated to the United States and raised their daughter in California.

Kamala Harris stands supported by her mother Shyamala in an undated photo.

Kamala Harris and sister Maya as young girls. Picture: Supplied

Irish historian Stephen McCracken traced Ms Harris’ lineage to one of the British Empire’s most infamous slave owners Hamilton Brown, who was uniquely “notorious” for his aggressive fighting against abolition in the early 1800s.

“I actually thought this was going to be a nice story, like (former US presidents) McKinley, Nixon, Jackson, Roosevelt, all of whom have links to Antrim, but it wasn’t,” Mr McCracken told The Belfast Telegraph.

“Hamilton Brown was a notorious figure, and not a nice fellow.”

Mr McCracken, who said Brown was the four-times-paternal-great-grandfather of Ms Harris’, looked into Ms Harris’ lineage after his cousins living in the US state of Georgia suggested she had Irish links.

Brown was born in Antrim, north of Ballymoney, in 1776, the year the 13 British colonies in the United States signed the Declaration of Independence.

He emigrated to Jamaica as a teenager and founded “Brown’s Town”, shipping in slaves to work on plantations and amassing great personal wealth before his death in 1843. After slavery was outlawed, he turned his attention to exploiting Irish immigrants, “effectively making slaves of them too”.

Ms Harris’ father, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, wrote about his family’s lineage to Brown in an article for the Jamaican Globe newspaper in 2018.

“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),” he wrote.

“And to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me),” he added, in a coincidental twist to the Irish ancestors President Joe Biden, whose mother was also a Finnegan.

Kamala Harris with sister, Maya, and mother Shyamala. Picture: Supplied

While Mr Harris made the direct link to Brown, the connection has not been definitively proven through records or DNA and the likelihood has been disputed by presidential genealogist Megan Smolenyak.

Ms Smolenyak, who traced the ancestral roots of Mr Biden and Barack Obama, said there was no record that Ms Harris was directly descended from Brown despite her father’s verbal history.

“Even if this were true, what matters is that at least one of her ancestors was raped, not that there might be an enslaver in the family tree,” Ms Smolenyak wrote on her website.

“What we’re dealing with is click-bait garbage that tries to blame Kamala Harris for the barbarity some of her female ancestors somehow survived.”

Ms Smolenyak, who worked on the “Who Do You Think You Are?” series tracing the family roots of celebrities, said there was “no proof” Ms Harris was connected to Hamilton Brown.

She said Brown was “in his own special category” of slave owner for his repeated trips to the UK to fight against the abolition of slavery.

“You can see how many he enslaved in 1817, 1820, 1823, 1826, 1829, and 1832. In each case, he enslaved over 100 individuals,” Ms Smolenyak added to The Irish Mail on Sunday. And while she can’t prove it, she has “no doubt” he raped some of those that he enslaved.

“Unfortunately, his DNA is floating out there but it’s one thing to know that on an intellectual level and to claim it with regard to somebody who might become the next president,” she said after Mr Trump’s race attacks.

The lack of proof is not for a lack of trying. Ms Smolenyak said she “had a go” but that there were just to many people with the same name from the same place.

She got as far as Ms Harris’ great-grand-mother, Christiana Brown, who had a record of birth dating back to between 1875 and 1890 to St Ann Parish, where Brown’s Town is located.

Donald Trump speaks tells Rachel Scott Kamala Harris “turned black”. Picture: AFP

Asked about her father’s reports of the family’s lineage to Hamilton Brown, Ms Smolenyak said he might have proof he’s reluctant to share but it’s most likely he was “parroting” what he was told by his elders.

“There’s obviously an element of truth. The family was from Brown’s Town but, as you might imagine, Brown’s Town was full of people using the name Brown, and even the name Hamilton. That turned into both a surname and a first name, and there are tons of people with that,” she said.

“Once you get past five generations or so it becomes really tricky and you’d have to test a whole bunch of people. I’m not saying hey look, I have this figured out. I’m saying I haven’t figured this out.”

Originally published as How Kamala Harris ‘descended’ from Ireland’s most notorious slave owner