With a healthy balance of historical data and humor, Myles Dungan (Irish Independent, Opinion) underscores a thread of Kamala Harris’s ancestry, writing that the “US vice-president is unlikely to celebrate her link to Antrim-born slave owner Hamilton Brown.”
“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” Kamala Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a distinguished research scientist, once asked her daughter, now the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for the US presidency. The question was in the context of Harris’s antecedents, evenly split between Jamaica and India.
Well not entirely, as it happens. Because she has some Irish ancestry too. One of her great-great-great-grandfathers hailed from Co Antrim. Which means, of course, that like every US politician eager to appeal to as wide a range of ethnic groups as possible, she will be anxious to establish and display her Irish-American credentials.
Well, maybe not in this case.
[. . .] It might be wise for over-zealous Irish genealogists (and the perennially enthusiastic Simon Harris) to steer clear of the Irish branch of this particular family tree.
We wouldn’t be truly Irish if we didn’t try and latch on to prominent US politicians and claim them as “Irish American”; it’s a bit like the Brits claiming Paul Mescal when he gets an Oscar nomination. We never quite managed to snare either Bush but, otherwise, almost everyone since Ronald Reagan has been advised of their Irish ancestry – even Barack Obama Kearney from Moneygall. [. . .]
However, it would be a brave genealogist (or taoiseach) who would try to entice vice-president Kamala Harris to the birthplace of her only Irish ancestor.
The great-great-great-grandfather in question was one Hamilton Brown, born in Co Antrim in the year of the declaration of American independence, 1776. Other than the coincidence of the year of his birth, any connection with freedom and liberty (other than his own) is purely accidental.
So, why would the presumptive nominee not try and establish her Irish credentials and milk a few Irish-American votes in the process? That would be because great-great-great-grandpappy Ham was a top-notch, fanatical, unreconstructed slave owner. He considered his pampered and privileged slaves to be more fortunate than the English poor, who were, of course, so much better off than the impoverished Irish.
In an article entitled “Reflections of a Jamaican father”, Kamala Harris’s own father, Donald J Harris, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford, wrote: “My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (nee Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town).”
The said Mr Brown did not stint himself when it came to the ownership of his fellow human beings. By the early 1800s, he had acquired 25 plantations in Jamaica. He received almost £20,000 for the loss of his human property (886 slaves) when a penitent British government awarded compensation to the discommoded slave owners of British colonies in the 1830s. He unsuccessfully sought another £5,000 for a further 233 slaves.
He appears to have arrived in Jamaica to work as a humble bookkeeper in 1795, but managed to accumulate a huge swathe of land (used for farming cattle and growing sugar).
Rather like his fellow Irishman, John Mitchel, born a bit farther south, in Newry, Co Down, Brown harboured some interesting ideas about the status of slaves vis a vis their soul mates, the Irish and English poor. [. . .] Or so he told a touring Methodist minister, Henry Whitely, a visitor to Jamaica in 1832 – the year before the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act at Westminster. [. . .] This is Whitely’s report of his meeting with vice-president Harris’s ancestor: “The same day I dined in St Ann’s Bay, on board the vessel I arrived in, in company with several colonists, among whom was Mr Hamilton Brown, representative for the parish of St Ann in the Colonial Assembly. [. . .] I was rather startled to hear that gentleman swear by his maker that that Order should never be adopted in Jamaica; nor would the planters of Jamaica, he said, permit the interference of the Home Government with their slaves in any shape. A great deal was said by him and others present about the happiness and comfort enjoyed by the slaves, and of the many advantages possessed by them of which the poor in England were destitute.”
[. . .] Whitely was a tad sceptical of Brown’s rose-tinted view of the life-enhancing benefits of enslavement, and his scepticism was soon justified. Travelling through the plantations of the island he witnessed a group of slaves manuring sugar canes while an overseer laid into them with a cart whip. “It appeared to me disgustingly dirty work; for the moisture from the manure was dripping through the baskets, and running down the bodies of the negroes,” he wrote. “This sight annoyed me considerably and raised some doubts as to the preferable condition of West India slaves to [English] factory children… the thundering crack of the cart whip, sounding in my ears as I rode along, excited feelings of a very unpleasant description.”
[. . .] Brown was obviously a sentimentalist (as long as your skin wasn’t black) because he called one of his 25 estates after the county of his birth. He gave his own first name to the town of Hamilton in Jamaica – but that was obviously considered disrespectful and something of a liberty, because it was later changed to the more deferential Brown’s Town.
Then, showing himself to be a true Irish patriot, after the emancipation of West Indian slaves, he sought to entice Irish people to settle in Jamaica. In 1835, he sent his ship, the James Ray, to Ballymoney, Co Antrim, to collect 121 Irish migrants and planted them around him in St Anns. These were followed, in 1836, by 185 more of his fellow countrymen. The avowed intention of this early assisted migration project was to ensure that freed slaves did not acquire land in Jamaica.
[. . .] This Irish charmer continued to live in the West Indies long after the emancipation of his chattels. He died there in 1845 at the age of 68. He appears to have expired after being thrown from his carriage.
Of course, culture wars being what they are, the madder breed of Republican has frequently attempted to weaponise Hamilton Brown against Harris. The headline a few years back on the right-wing website Red State is fairly typical – “When Will Race-Baiting Kamala Harris Acknowledge She is a Descendant of a Slave Owner?” Permit me to offer a considered and carefully thought-out rebuttal to that particular line of argument: what a load of abject nutjob b*****ks.
I hope the above is a sufficiently reflective and intellectual riposte. If not, it is probably worth noting that most black people who are descended from slave owners are also descended from slaves. [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/myles-dungan-we-can-forgive-kamala-harris-for-not-pursuing-her-possible-family-link-to-an-odious-irish-slave-trader/a704055725.html
With a healthy balance of historical data and humor, Myles Dungan (Irish Independent, Opinion) underscores a thread of Kamala Harris’s ancestry, writing that the “US vice-president is unlikely to celebrate her link to Antrim-born slave owner Hamilton Brown.” “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” Kamala Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a distinguished
