Did Vice President Kamala Harris host a private dinner at her residence that excluded Black leaders without explanation? No, that's not true: although the dinner that Harris hosted on June 15, 2021 was attended almost exclusively by non-Black and white women, that is because the invitees of the dinner were current women U.S. Senators -- none of whom are Black.
The claim appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published on June 17, 2021. The post included an image of the dinner's guests with a caption that read:
Where is the BLACK GIRL MAGIC?
Alpha Kappa Alpha...Ske WeeeCan you spot Kamala Harris?
I can spot the black butler real easy thoVice President Kamala Harris hosted a dinner party for a bipartisan group of female senators at her official Washington, DC, residence
This is what the post looked like on Facebook on June 21, 2021:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Mon Jun 21 16:04:59 2021 UTC)
Although the invitation list was bipartisan, not much more diversity was present at the dinner, as only three of the 24 current women U.S. senators identify with a non-European ethnicity. In 2017, Harris began her service as the first Black U.S. Senator to represent California. Carol Moseley Braun was the first and only other Black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate,where she represented California from 1993-1999. There have only been 11 Black U.S. Senators in the nation's history.
During her undergraduate education at Howard University, Harris was initiated as a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., a historically Black service organization founded in 1908 that boasts nearly 300,000 members. The reference to "Skee-Wee" in the Facebook post's caption refers to the sorority's official sound. None of Harris' sorors, or fellow sorority members, were present because none of the current women U.S. senators are members of the organization.
Besides the appearance of a Black staff member in the Facebook post's image, another image of the dinner shows a Black woman standing at a distance from the dinner table. The woman appears to be Tina Flournoy, Harris' chief of staff, who is not a member of the residence staff.
