Given Donald Trump’s recent comments about Kamala Harris’ racial and ethnic identity, it’s an unfortunate coincidence that earlier this week I posted an article pointing out that Harris had once placed more importance on her Indian roots.
So, formally distancing myself from Trump’s views, I don’t believe Harris is lying about her black identity, and the fact that she has previously drawn public attention to her Indian roots as part of her political persona does not mean that she is being disingenuous about her black identity.
And it’s pretty ridiculous and offensive to say she can’t identify with both her black and Indian roots. And she does! As far as I know, she has been pretty forthright from the beginning of her public life about her (mostly unseen) father being black and her mother being Indian, and how she struggled to raise her in a way that exposed her to both cultures and identities.
Naturally, she will publicly emphasize one or the other depending on the situation.I’m doing a segment on Indian cooking with Mindy Kaling. It’s different than, say, speaking at a sorority house at a historically black college. Of course, highlighting a particular identity can have political overtones. But at the end of the day, she’s a politician, and she’s going to act like one.
As an author A book on modern racial classification in AmericaOne thing I noticed is that she almost never refers to herself as “multiracial.” Again, this is entirely understandable. The “multiracial” movement gained momentum in the US in the early 1990s, driven primarily by young activists with black and non-black parents. What particularly irritated them was that not only could they not (and still can’t) check “multiracial” on the census and other federal forms, but they had to choose only one racial box to check, and they couldn’t, say, check “Asian American” and “Black” (as they have been able to do since 1997). But Harris came of age shortly before this became “fashionable,” so it’s not surprising that she doesn’t use the term multiracial.
Update: Here are Trump’s comments from an interview at a conference of black journalists: “I didn’t know she was black until a few years ago, when she became black. And now she wants to be known as black. So I don’t know if she’s Indian or black. … She’s always been Indian and then all of a sudden she turned around and became black.” I think Trump is also a product of a time when, at least officially, she had to “choose” one identity, but rather, I think it’s an attempt to turn some black voters against her by falsely suggesting that she is exploiting the black heritage she previously ignored.
