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Anyone who has questioned Kamala Harris’s racial heritage just needed to spend debate night with Black Capitol Hill staffers.
The debate between the vice president, herself a former member of the Congressional Black Caucus when she was a senator, and former president Donald Trump served as a kickoff for the CBC Foundation’s annual legislative conference.
For the uninitiated, CBC week is a part networking event, part policy summit that turns Washington DC into a block party. It’s not uncommon to see members on the weekend stepping out for a boozy brunch.
Plenty of Black Hill staffers also take part and, at the Park on 14th, a Black-owned restaurant and bar located only two blocks away from the White House, plenty of the Hill’s denizens took a break from avoiding a Republican-induced government shutdown to convene for an event honoring staff on Tuesday night.
Jim Clyburn, the former House majority whip whom many credit for making Joe Biden president when he endorsed him in the 2020 Democratic primary, gave clear marching orders to every member of the Divine Nine sororities and fraternities.
“All of us are AKAs,” he said, in reference to Alpha Kappa Alpha, the sorority Harris joined when she attended Howard University. Harris also served as a point of pride given that not only would she be the first Black woman to become president were she to win, she would become the first alumnus of a historically Black college, Howard University (often called “The Mecca” by alumni and whose mascot is the Bison).
“I feel like it’s on par, this is what we do at the Mecca,” Neosho Ponder, who earned her master’s and doctorate from Howard, told The Independent on Tuesday night.
“And being a part of this, this legacy of Bison that are changing the landscape of the world. I mean, it's just an honor.”
Few people understand the racist undertones of calling Harris a “DEI hire” more than Black staffers who work on Capitol Hill, a place where many white staffers can afford to work for the criminally low pay in government because their parents subsidize their rent and got their jobs thanks to who they knew or what prestigious college they attended.
So Trump’s attack on Harris for attending a “sorority party” instead of meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu elicited especially outraged boos from the watch party attendees.
“So I really encourage him to find Jesus,” Bree Prince, a member of Harris’s sorority, told The Independent about Trump.
“I really encourage him to examine himself and to wonder why he thinks it's okay to talk to her the way that he does.”
Of course, this being a gathering of staffers, many attendees were often staring at their phones, sending messages or crafting talking points on their bosses’ behalf.
But, every once in a while, they would cheer or snap their fingers.
One such moment came when Harris said about Trump that “clearly he’s having a very hard time processing that” he lost the 2020 election.
Besides Clyburn, other CBC members also joined the party, including Representatives Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of the Squad, both of whom lost their primaries thanks to a boatload of cash from outside groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spending money in the contests due to their outspoken criticism of Israel.
Bowman was on hand to honor his chief of staff, and later regaled the room.
But some staffers also criticized Harris when she talked about Israel’s right to defend itself and the US sending weapons to Israel, with one person saying: “Sis, what are you doing?”
That, however, was only a brief hiccup in a night that otherwise had people in the room excited. This especially comes as Harris and the Democrats as a whole are trying to win back working-class, non-white voters, particularly Black men.
“I think it’s everybody's job to be having these conversations,” Prince said. “These are dinner table conversations, these are family text message conversations we have to be talking about it, we have to inform our friends and family.”
Edwin Hubbard, another attendee, told The Independent during one of the commerical breaks that Harris was doing great, but that he wanted to see more.
“They have to make him answer questions directly, He's dancing around questions and not really giving true answers, and he’s flat out lying,” he said.
Later, when Harris went on the offense, Hubbard said: “She done got under his skin.”
By the end, many staffers were not even watching the debate, rather choosing to chat with their friends or check their phones.
As the debate ended, the DJ cut off the audio and decided to, perhaps fittingly, blare Kendrick Lamar, proclaming: “Alls my life I has to fight... we gon' be alright.”
