‘Black and proud’: Kamala Harris has never shied away from racial identity

‘Black and proud’: Kamala Harris has never shied away from racial identity
Vice President Kamala Harris, left, is greeted by Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis, right, during her arrival at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, onJuly 31, 2024. (AP)
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Updated 04 August 2024
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‘Black and proud’: Kamala Harris has never shied away from racial identity

‘Black and proud’: Kamala Harris has never shied away from racial identity
  • Kamala's mother, who emigrated from India to pursue a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology, raised her with emphasis on both her India and Black heritage
  • As a child, she was bused to a newly desegregated elementary school in a wealthier white neighborhood and attended a Black church on Sundays

WASHINGTON: Former president Donald Trump, who has a long history of making incendiary comments about race, has stepped up his attacks on his 2024 White House rival Kamala Harris by claiming she “happened to turn Black” for political advantage.
But the reality is that the vice president, the product of a mixed race marriage between Jamaican and Indian immigrants, embraced her Blackness long before embarking on a career in public service.

Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964, to Afro-Jamaican Donald Harris, who came to the United States to study economics, and Shyamala Gopalan, who emigrated from India at 19 to pursue her doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology.
They met at the University of California, Berkeley, a hub of student activism, while participating in the civil rights movement — and sometimes even taking a toddler Kamala along to marches.
Donald Harris remains a professor emeritus at Stanford University, while Gopalan, who helped advance breast cancer research, passed away in 2009.
After the couple divorced, Gopalan raised Kamala and her younger sister Maya, instilling pride in their South Asian roots. She took them on trips to India and often expressed affection or frustration in Tamil, Kamala wrote in her 2019 book, “The Truths We Hold.”
But Gopalan also understood she was raising two Black daughters.
“She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to ensure we grew into confident, proud Black women,” Harris wrote.
As a child, Harris was bused to a newly desegregated elementary school in a wealthier white neighborhood and attended a Black church on Sundays.
“I’m Black, and I’m proud of being Black, and I was born Black, I will die Black,” Harris told The Breakfast Club radio show in 2019.
But she’s continued to lean into her Indian heritage too, appearing in a 2019 video where she and actress Mindy Kaling, also of Indian descent, bonded over making dosas.
“She’s embraced her Blackness and her Indian heritage as well,” said Kerry Haynie, chair of political science at Duke University, adding that Trump’s “race-baiting” attacks were aimed at galvanizing his own base.

When it came time for college, Harris chose Howard University, a historically Black institution in the US capital, following in the footsteps of her hero Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice on the US Supreme Court.
She attended protests against apartheid in South Africa and joined the storied Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, founded to support Black women. Today, its 360,000 members include leading figures in politics, the arts, science and more.
“It’s a powerful signal of alignment with Black Americans,” said Christopher Clark, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
After Howard, Harris enrolled at UC Hastings College of the Law, where she was elected president of the Black Law Students Association.
As she progressed through her career — elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003 and California’s attorney general in 2010 — she was consistently identified as Black or African American in media reports.
Some went so far as to dub her the “female Obama” after Barack Obama, who was elected the nation’s first Black president in 2008.
Their biographies have parallels: both are biracial, with Obama’s father a Kenyan economist and his mother a white American.
Critics questioned the authenticity of his African American experience, and Trump may be using a similar tactic to try to discredit Harris, suggested Clark.
However, being Black in America has always been a “very broad umbrella” due to the legacy of slavery, wrote Teresa Wiltz in a Politico op-ed, encompassing “myriad iterations of skin color and hair texture and life experiences.”
The most important Black political figures in US history have often been of mixed race, from abolitionist Frederick Douglass to activist-philosopher Angela Davis, Wiltz noted.
If Harris identifies as Black, “we can — and should — take her word for it,” she said.


Power outage hits Cannes Film Festival and traffic in southeastern France

Updated 3 sec ago
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Power outage hits Cannes Film Festival and traffic in southeastern France

Power outage hits Cannes Film Festival and traffic in southeastern France
CANNES: A major power outage struck southeastern France on Saturday, disrupting traffic and briefly halting events at the Cannes Film Festival as the prestigious event prepared to hand out its top prize.
About 160,000 households in the Alpes-Maritimes department lost electricity after a high-voltage line fell Saturday morning, electricity network operator RTE said on X. The outage came hours after a fire at an electrical substation near Cannes overnight had already weakened the grid.
Cannes Film Festival organizers confirmed the outage affected the early activities of Saturday and said the Palais des Festivals — the Croisette’s main venue — had switched to an independent power supply.
“All scheduled events and screenings, including the Closing Ceremony, will proceed as planned and under normal conditions,” the statement said. “At this stage, the cause of the outage has not yet been identified. Restoration efforts are underway.”
Still, screenings at the Cineum, one of the festival’s satellite venues, were briefly suspended, the festival added.
Traffic lights in parts of Cannes and the surrounding city of Antibes stopped working after 10 a.m., leading to traffic jams and confusion in city centers. Most shops along the Croisette remained closed, and local food kiosks were only accepting cash. Train service in Cannes was also disrupted.
Authorities said restoration efforts were ongoing and urged residents to remain cautious during travel.

Former Minneapolis police chief recalls ‘absolutely gut-wrenching’ moment of seeing George Floyd video

Former Minneapolis police chief recalls ‘absolutely gut-wrenching’ moment of seeing George Floyd video
Updated 38 min 37 sec ago
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Former Minneapolis police chief recalls ‘absolutely gut-wrenching’ moment of seeing George Floyd video

Former Minneapolis police chief recalls ‘absolutely gut-wrenching’ moment of seeing George Floyd video
  • What he saw conflicted with what his own people had told him about the deadly encounter
  • The video shows Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, pinning him to the pavement

MINNEAPOLIS: Former Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo vividly remembers receiving a call around midnight from a community activist. The caller told him to watch a video spreading on social media of a white officer pinning a Black man to the ground, despite his fading pleas of “I can’t breathe.”
The dying man was George Floyd. The officer was Derek Chauvin. And Arradondo was the city’s first Black police chief.
“It was absolutely gut-wrenching,” Arradondo, 58, recalled in an interview ahead of the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s murder.
What he saw conflicted with what his own people had told him about the deadly encounter, and he knew immediately it would mean changes for his department and city. But he acknowledged he didn’t immediately foresee how deeply Floyd’s death would reverberate in the US and around the world.
“I served for 32 years,” he said. “But there’s no doubt May 25th, 2020, is a defining moment for me in my public service career.”
The video shows Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck, pinning him to the pavement outside a convenience store where Floyd had tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes. Chauvin maintained the pressure for 9-1/2 minutes despite pleas from onlookers to stop, even after an off-duty firefighter tried to intervene and another officer said he couldn’t find a pulse.
‘Remnants of pain and anger’
Arradondo sat for the interview in a public library that was heavily damaged in the unrest that followed Floyd’s death. It’s on Lake Street, a major artery that saw some of the worst destruction, a street that he says still bears “remnants of the pain and anger of what occurred five years ago.”
Just down the block, there’s the empty shell of a police station that was torched during the riots. And within sight is a Target store and a Cub Foods supermarket that were looted. Storefronts remain boarded up. While some businesses were rebuilt, empty lots sit where others did not.
Arradondo still stands by his and Mayor Jacob Frey’s decision to abandon the Third Precinct and let it burn. Protesters breached the building, and police — who were spread thin — didn’t have the resources to hold it. So he ordered his officers to evacuate.
“During the most significant crisis we’ve ever experienced, arguably in the state, when it’s life or death, I’ve got to go on the side of keeping people alive and safe,” he said.
Police reform
Arradondo subsequently helped launch an overhaul of policing in the city despite a resistant police culture and a powerful officers union. He testified against Chauvin in his 2021 murder trial, a rare breach of the “blue wall” that traditionally protects officers from being held accountable for wrongdoing.
Five years on, Arradondo, who retired in 2022, said he believes law enforcement agencies nationwide have made progress on police accountability — albeit incremental progress — and that police chiefs and sheriffs now move faster to hold officers responsible for egregious misconduct.
Arradondo was promoted to chief in 2017, and his elevation was greeted with hope among local African Americans who affectionately called him “Rondo.” But his department had a reputation for being too quick to use force and many were angry about police killing young Black men in Minnesota and beyond.
Arradondo said he wishes he had made more changes to the police department before Floyd was killed.
“I would have pushed harder and sooner at trying to dismantle some of the toxic culture that allowed that indifference to exist that evening, on May 25th, 2020,” he said. “I certainly would have invested more time elevating the voices in our community that had been pleading with police departments for decades to listen to us and change.”
Making amends
Arradondo just published a book, “Chief Rondo: Securing Justice for the Murder of George Floyd,” that explores leadership, justice and race, the broader impacts of policing, and the challenges of working within a flawed system. He closes it with a letter dedicated to Floyd’s daughter, Gianna.
“I never had an opportunity to meet Gianna, but I wanted her to know that, even though I was not out there that evening, at that intersection when her father was pleading for help, that I heard him, and I was going to do everything I could to bring him justice,” he said.
He wanted to say the words that she has not heard from the four former officers who were convicted for their roles in George Floyd’s death:
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for your father being taken from you.”


Fire in Nairobi informal settlement kills eight

Fire in Nairobi informal settlement kills eight
Updated 37 min 11 sec ago
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Fire in Nairobi informal settlement kills eight

Fire in Nairobi informal settlement kills eight
  • The fire in the city’s Makina area began at around 5:00 am
  • The cause has not been established

NAIROBI: A fire tore through an informal settlement in the Kenyan capital Nairobi on Saturday, killing at least eight people, police said.

The fire in the city’s Makina area began at around 5:00 am (0200 GMT), said police official Patricia Yegon.


“Eight people were burnt to death, while several others were injured,” she said, without specifying how many were hurt.

The cause has not been established, but fires frequently occur in the capital’s overcrowded and impoverished informal settlements.

The Kenyan Red Cross said 40 houses were affected before firefighters contained the blaze with the help of the local community.


Bangladesh sounds alarm as ‘extreme desperation’ drives Rohingya into deadly sea journeys

Bangladesh sounds alarm as ‘extreme desperation’ drives Rohingya into deadly sea journeys
Updated 24 May 2025
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Bangladesh sounds alarm as ‘extreme desperation’ drives Rohingya into deadly sea journeys

Bangladesh sounds alarm as ‘extreme desperation’ drives Rohingya into deadly sea journeys
  • UNHCR says 427 Rohingya died in accidents off Myanmar’s coast in early May
  • Thousands of refugees have attempted perilous sea voyages in past few years

DHAKA: Bangladeshi authorities on Saturday raised the alarm over increasing numbers of Rohingya refugees taking risky boat journeys to flee the coastal district of Cox’s Bazar. 

Bangladesh hosts more than 1.3 million Rohingya Muslims, who, for decades, have fled neighboring Myanmar to escape persecution, especially during a military crackdown in 2017. The majority of them live in Cox’s Bazar in eastern Bangladesh, which has become the world’s largest refugee settlement.

Over the years, humanitarian conditions in Cox’s Bazar’s cramped refugee camps have been deteriorating, with aid continuously declining since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nearly one in five people attempting to flee the settlement by sea have been reported as dead or missing so far in 2025, according to UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency.

Two boats which capsized on May 9 and 10 were carrying a total of 514 Rohingya refugees from Cox’s Bazar and Myanmar’s Rakhine state, according to UNHCR, which estimates that at least 427 of them died.

“The ongoing funding crisis for the Rohingya is severely hampering the lives of Rohingya in the camps in Cox’s Bazar, which fueled the desperation for the perilous sea journey,” Mizanur Rahman, refugee relief and repatriation commissioner in Cox’s Bazar, told Arab News.

“Every aspect of their lives — food, livelihood, health, and so on — has been severely impacted. Most importantly, it has darkened their future also. They are at a loss what to do. The uncertainty in their lives triggered many of them to (undertake) the risky sea journeys towards unknown destinations.”

Over the past few years, UNHCR has documented thousands of Rohingya refugees embarking on deadly sea journeys from Bangladesh — and, to a lesser extent, from Myanmar — and reported hundreds dying or going missing.

The Rohingya, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority, lived for centuries in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state but were stripped of their citizenship in the 1980s. Since then, many of them have fled to Bangladesh, where they are almost entirely reliant on humanitarian aid.

Despite multiple attempts by Bangladeshi authorities, the UN-backed repatriation and resettlement process of the Rohingya has so far failed to take off.

In 2025, aid for the Rohingya faced another cut after US President Donald Trump’s administration announced it was eliminating most US aid globally. Washington was the largest donor of foreign aid to the Rohingya last year, contributing $301 million — 55 percent of all foreign aid received.

UNHCR requires $383 million in 2025 to “stabilize the lives of refugees and their host communities” across Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, as well as those displaced inside Myanmar. But, as of Friday, it had secured only 30 percent of that amount.

The deadly boat accidents earlier this month may have been fueled by “extreme desperation,” UNHCR said, highlighting that it occurred during the monsoon season, which is a particularly dangerous time for boat travel in the region.

“The dire humanitarian situation, exacerbated by funding cuts, is having a devastating impact on the lives of Rohingya, with more and more resorting to dangerous journeys to seek safety, protection and a dignified life for themselves and their families,” said Hai Kyung Jun, UNHCR director for Asia and the Pacific.

“The latest tragedy is a chilling reminder that access to meaningful protection, especially in countries of first asylum, as well as responsibility sharing and collective efforts along sea routes, are essential to saving lives.”


South Africa rescues all 260 miners stuck underground alive

South Africa rescues all 260 miners stuck underground alive
Updated 24 May 2025
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South Africa rescues all 260 miners stuck underground alive

South Africa rescues all 260 miners stuck underground alive
  • The miners were trapped underground on Thursday at the Kloof gold mine, 60 kilometers west of Johannesburg
  • The gold mine is one of the deepest operated by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed company

WESTONARIA, South Africa: Rescuers on Friday pulled out all 260 mine workers who had been stuck for more than 24 hours in an underground shaft in South Africa, the mine’s operator said.
The miners were trapped underground on Thursday at the Kloof gold mine, 60 kilometers (37 miles) west of Johannesburg, after a hoist used to access the shaft was damaged in an accident, the mining company Sibanye-Stillwater said.
The first phase of the rescue brought 79 people to the surface by 1:30 p.m. (1130 GMT) while the rest were rescued six hours later, it said in a statement.
“At no point was there any risk of injury to employees during the incident,” it said. A decision had been made against using the emergency escape routes which would have involved the miners walking longer distances, it added.
The gold mine is one of the deepest operated by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed company.
Desperate relatives of the miners waited outside the site during the rescue efforts, most of them expressing shock at the incident, local television footage showed.
“All affected employees will also undergo thorough medical examinations, if required, while support has also been extended to employees’ families,” the mining company said.
The National Union of Mineworkers said the incident happened around 10:00 a.m. (0800 GMT) on Thursday. It expressed concern for the miners who had been “underground for almost 20 hours.”
Sibanye-Stillwater had said earlier that the miners would be brought to the surface around midday Friday.
“The employees are not trapped; it was decided to keep them at the sub-shaft station for now,” spokesperson Henrika Ninham said.
Mining employs hundreds of thousands of people in South Africa, which is the biggest exporter of platinum and a major exporter of gold, diamonds, coal and other raw materials. But accidents are common.
Dozens of mineworkers are killed each year, though the numbers have been falling as safety standards have been stepped up over the past two decades.
According to industry group Minerals Council South Africa, 42 miners died in 2024, compared to 55 the previous year.
Sibanye-Stillwater chief executive Neal Froneman said Friday they would not resume operations “until we are confident that all the necessary remedial actions have been implemented.”