NBC News will need take time to recover after this…
The great – great-grandfather of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell owned slaves, which according to NBC News invalidates his opposition to reparations for the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of black slaves in America.
“McConnell has opposed paying reparations to descendants of slaves, though census records show his family, like many others, benefited from their labor,” reads the report. The “though” reveals the reporters’ hand: you can either descend from slave-owners or oppose reparations, but you can’t do both – at least according to NBC.
If the validity of our political views is determined by our heritage, does this rule cut both ways?
If the validity of our political views is determined by our heritage, does this rule cut both ways? California senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has endorsed some form of reparations for the descendants of slaves. But, like McConnell, Harris, too, descends from slaveowners.
“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),” writes Harris’ father Donald in a post for the Jamaican Global. If Mitch McConnell’s slave-owning forebears invalidate his opinion of reparations, how can the same not be true for Kamala Harris?