Member-only story
What The #ADOS Crowd Gets Wrong About Slavery
Once Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) announced her run for president, a motley crew of Harris-haters on Twitter began publicly swearing that they were not going to support her. While many, pushing the #KamalaIsACop narrative, took exception to her record as a prosecutor and as the California Attorney General, others bridled at the over Harris' habit of describing herself as an African-American. Most of these posters used the hashtag #ADOS in their tweets.
ADOS stands for “American Descendant of Slaves.” The hashtag which may or may not have originated on a Russian troll farm, has been eagerly adopted by an increasing number of real-life black Americans. According to the #ADOS crowd, Harris whose mother was Indian and whose father is Jamaican, is not an American Descendant of Slaves despite being a black woman who was born in Oakland, California.
This assertion is made under several erroneous assumptions, the most glaring one being that somehow people of African descent living in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and even in Europe are somehow not the descendants of slaves. The fact that many Afro-Latinos openly dispute their African roots only adds to the confusion.
But not knowing something (or refusing outright to believe something that was proven true) doesn’t make it not so.
