Vice President Kamala Harris invoked a 1970’s California-based protest over grapes on Labor Day claiming she did not eat a grape until her 20s because she would “never cross a picket line” during the Cesar Chavez-led United Farm Workers (UFW) boycott.
For context, the UFW website states: On September 8, 1965, Filipino American grape workers, members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, walked out on strike against Delano-area table and wine grape growers protesting years of poor pay and conditions. The Filipinos asked Cesar Chavez, who led a mostly Latino farm workers union, the National Farm Workers Association, to join their strike.
Cesar and the leaders of the NFWA believed it would be years before their fledgling union was ready for a strike. But he also knew how growers historically pitted one race against another to break field walkouts. Cesar’s union voted to join the Filipino workers’ walkouts on Mexican Independence Day, September 16, 1965. From the beginning, this would be a different kind of strike.
The New York Post reports that this is false, however. If Harris didn’t eat grapes until in her 20s that would have coincided with the UFW protest, meaning she would have crossed the “picket line” and eat grapes while others toiled in their labor.
Pro-worker activists, inspired by Chaves and the UFW, shunned grape consumption while Harris would have been between the ages of 19 and 36, the outlet reports.
The UFW had a few grape boycotts when Harris, who was born in 1964, was a child. Those ended in 1970 and 1978.
The longest protest over grapes that was led by the UFW started in 1984, when Harris was 19, and ended in 2000 when Harris was 36.
Harris could have only eaten protest-free, boycott-lifted, UFW activist-approved grapes between the ages of 14 and nineteen.
“This sounds quaint, and so I’m reluctant to say it, but, you know, I didn’t eat a grape until I was in my 20s,” Harris said Monday.
“Like, literally, had never had a grape. I remember the first time I had a grape, I went, ‘Wow! This is quite tasty.’ It was absolutely ingrained so deeply in me: Never cross a picket line.”
In another instance of bizarre, meaningless lying, Harris claimed that she listened to Tupac and Snoop Dogg while she attended college. Harris would have not been able to do that, however, as the two did not make it into music until after she was well into her post-college career. Harris also lied, for seemingly no reason, that she would not take a Covid vaccine that was made by President Donald Trump.
