It's no surprise that the 2020 presidential election was a tense run. President Donald
Trump often referred to President-elect Joe Biden as "Sleepy Joe" and brought up
the Swine Flu as evidence that Biden could not take over a pandemic-stricken America.
On the other hand, Biden dug into the reignited Black Lives Matter movement
in America and declared Trump "one of the most racist presidents we've had in modern history."
Vice President-elect Kamala Harris also received her fair share of disapproval
from Trump. In an interview following the October 2020 vice presidential debate,
Trump called Harris a "monster" and "unlikeable." It's safe to assume
that any person running for political office is prepared to face the fiercest criticism. However,
Harris might not have anticipated the latest reason she's in hot water. An
interview Harris did with Elle magazine has resurfaced, and it's already haunting her.
The Elle interview from October 2020 is making the rounds again because people are accusing
the vice president-elect of plagiarizing Martin Luther King Jr. In the interview,
Harris tells a story supposedly from her childhood about when she became briefly
separated from her mother at a civil rights march in Oakland, California,
after falling out of her stroller. Once they reunited, Harris says this exchange happened:
"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.’”
Several Twitter users noted that the story is shockingly similar to one told by MLK
in a January 1965 interview with Playboy magazine. In his narrative,
the civil rights icon tells a story of a 7- or 8-year-old Black girl who marched with her
mom in a protest in Birmingham, Alabama, and was accosted by policemen. According to King,
"'What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked at him
straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom.' She couldn’t even pronounce it, but she knew.
It was beautiful! Many times when I have been in sorely trying situations,
the memory of that little one has come into my mind, and has buoyed me.”"
This is not the first time Harris has used this "Fweedom" anecdote. She referenced it
in her 2010 book Smart on Crime and detailed it again in her 2019 book The Truths We Hold:
An American Journey. She also told the story to Jimmy Fallon in June 2020.
"And she said, 'Kamala, what do you want?' And I said, and this is how she would say
it, and she said, 'Kamala, what do you want?' and I said, 'Fweedom.'"
Naturally, people took to the internet to air their grievances about Kamala Harris'
strikingly familiar story. One Twitter user wrote,
"She is learning how to plagiarize and lie like Biden. They make a good con artist team."
Another person wondered why she didn't just give credit to Martin Luther King
Jr. instead of possibly fabricating an entire story. And several people,
in fact, mentioned that Harris was following in the footsteps of Joe Biden. The former vice
president came under fire in 2019 for his "Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental
Justice," which included sentences copied directly from environment groups with no credit given,
according to NBC News. This was not the first time he had been accused of plagiarism.
Opponents of Biden and Harris had previously used plagiarism accusations as a way to weaken
the public's trust in the team. Sean Hannity of Fox News reminded his viewers in July 2020,
"Plagiarism [is] nothing new for Joe Biden. In the 1980s,
he was forced to end his presidential campaign [when] he was caught red-handed plagiarizing
a British politician by the name of Neil Kinnock word-for-word on multiple occasions."
Furthermore, people were quick to point out that this isn't the first time Harris has
been associated with plagiarism. Politico reported in 2019 that Harris appeared to plagiarize parts
of the since-deleted gender equality section of her website. The publication noticed that
Harris seemed to use information from the American Heart Association website also without citation.
The vice president-elect has not addressed the most recent allegations,
as of the making of this video.
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