Kamala Harris is no ‘fweedom’ fighter

Around the time of the election, vice-president-elect Kamala Harris treated the unsuspecting readers of Elle magazine to a cringe-inducing anecdote.

Harris claimed that, as a child, she was wheeled through a civil-rights march in Oakland, California on a pushchair by her mother. At one point, she says, she fell out of the pushchair and the adults, caught up in the protest, accidentally left her behind. When her mother returned she tried to comfort her:

‘My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing… and she’s like, “Baby, what do you want? What do you need?” And I just looked at her and I said, “FWEEDOM!”.’

That’s right: ‘Fweedom!’

But eagle-eyed Twitter users have now noticed that Harris’s baby steps for fweedom bear a striking resemblance to a story told by Martin Luther King in a 1965 Playboy interview.

MLK was at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama and overheard a policeman gruffly asking an eight-year-old black girl, ‘What do you want?’. ‘Fee-dom’, she answered.