Editorial: The New York Times

• Millions of Black Americans are descendants of slaveholders who fathered children with the women they owned. In the case of Kamala Harris, her lineage traces back to prominent 19th-century slave trader Hamilton Brown.
• Hamilton Brown's story has been under the media spotlight ever since Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee.
• The story of Kamala Harris's Caribbean family gives us a sense of what drove her to identify as a Black woman.
• At least 70 percent of the 12 million captives who were taken out of Africa were destined for the sugar colonies centered in the Caribbean. Jamaica received more than twice as many Africans as all of the 13 North American colonies.
• Kamala Harris is quite proximate to Jamaican slavery in a generational sense. Her great-grandmother, Christiana Brown, was born around the 1880s, when the slave owner and legislator Hamilton Brown was not yet 40 years dead.

Conclusion: It's likely that Kamala Harris knows Christiana Brown's story but has refrained from exploiting it for political gain.

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