In light of Donald Trump’s recent comments about Kamala Harris’ racial/ethnic identity, I posted something earlier this week pointing out that it was an unfortunate coincidence that Harris had once placed more emphasis on her Indian heritage.
So I’m going to officially dissociate myself from Trump, and no, I don’t think Harris is faking her black identity, and that she has ever given more public attention to the Indian part of her heritage as part of her political image, This fact does not mean that it is disingenuous to say that she also identifies as black.
To say she can’t identify with her black and Indian heritage is incredibly stupid and disrespectful. She did it! As far as I can tell, from the earliest days of her public career, she has been very outspoken about the fact that her (largely absent) father was black and her mother was Indian, and her mother took pains to raise her as a child. She was exposed to both cultures and cultures.
Not surprisingly, she publicly emphasizes one or the other depending on the context—for example, doing an Indian cooking show with Mindy Kaling or speaking at a party for her historically black college fraternity. Of course, sometimes the emphasis on one identity or another has political implications. But she is a politician after all, so she should act like one!
As the author of a book about modern racial classification in America, one thing I noticed is that she rarely refers to herself as “multiracial.” This is also easy to understand. In the early 1990s, a “multiracial” movement emerged in the United States, driven largely by young activists with a black and non-black parent. One thing that particularly annoys them is that not only can you not check “multiracial” on the census and other federal forms (you still can’t), but you have to select only one race box to check, and you can’t check ” Asian” for example, “American” and “Black” (now possible since 1997). But it was a “thing” before Harris came of age, so it’s no surprise she doesn’t use multiracial terms.
