An election year that was already fiercely partisan was completely upended by President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 White House race and support Vice President Kamala Harris. But it wasn’t just Harris’ late arrival that electrified things. It’s also the history to be made if the presumptive Democratic nominee becomes the first female president who is also multiracial.
Daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, both of whom immigrated to the US during the Civil Rights Movement, Harris’ historic presidential candidacy was once again highlight American identity politics and the growing number of people who say they are multiracial.
Different countries divide people into categories depending on different national traditions. The US, with its history shaped by slavery, divides people into black or white, and nine million people identified as multiracial in 2010.
When Harris ran for vice president in 2020, 33.8 million people in the U.S. identified as more than one race, according to the census.
Yes she is. Her father, Donald Jasper Harris, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, is a naturalized American citizen and born in Jamaica.
Harris said her mother deliberately raised her and her sister as black because she felt that was how the world would see them first. Harris chose to go to Howard University, a historically black college and university in Washington, DC. The vice president maintains close ties to her alma mater and her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.
Being multiracial often means people try to categorize you and then treat you accordingly, said Dr. Kalya Castillo, a licensed psychologist in New York whose clinical interests include multiracial identity. She has met with patients who seek therapy for a problem and end up talking about being biracial or multiracial.
“What are the messages you received from your family, the external community and society?” said Castillo, who is black and Japanese. “I have more people curious about exploring this now.”
Every multiracial person’s experience and the way they choose to present themselves is different. There’s also no way to predict whether someone will decide to stereotype you. Castillo said many people assume she is a member of a “model minority” group because of her Japanese heritage.
Growing up, however, her Asian mother feared how Castillo would be treated if people saw her as black.
“She knew a little bit about the discrimination that African Americans and black people face in America,” Castillo said.
Yes she is. Her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a biomedical scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was born in India.
In 2020, there was criticism that Harris’s Indigenous heritage did not receive much media attention. Some wonder if this is happening again.
“What I’ve seen in the last 24 hours is people standing up for the South Asian community by arguing or complaining that their Asianness is being erased,” said Stephen Caliendo, co-founder and co-director of The Project. on Race in Political Communication at North Central College.
“She is often called the black candidate,” he said.
From the playground to the workplace, being multiracial can be fraught with challenges. In politics, it can trigger attacks rooted in race rather than political disagreements.
A day after Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett called her a “DEI hire” in a TV interview. Conservatives have used diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to argue that unqualified people are hired solely based on their race and gender.
But GOP leaders are now urging Republicans to put an end to racist and sexist attacks for fear of alienating voters.
Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University who has written extensively about black politicians and political and racial mobilization, says both racist and sexist tropes were unavoidable for Harris. Republican Party vice presidential candidate JD Vance said at a rally that Harris has only “received a paycheck from the government over the last 20 years.”
“Kamala Harris has achieved something uniquely tailored to stereotypes about black women,” Gillespie said.
Even seemingly innocuous words from Harris generated arguments that seemed racist, Caliendo said. In her first statement after Biden’s withdrawal, Harris announced “my intention is to achieve and win this nomination.” Very quickly, some Republican officials joked that she had won nothing.
“It fits the stereotype of undeserving members of minority groups, especially women, as a ‘welfare queen’ kind of thing,” Caliendo said. “She feels entitled to something she didn’t deserve. She’s using this as a vaccine against what she expects.”
Conservatives also butchered Harris’s first name, prompting accusations of racism and disrespect. Kamala (KAH’-mah-lah) means lotus in Sanskrit. At his first rally since Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, Republican Donald Trump repeatedly mispronounced her name as part of a broad attack on someone he called the “new victim of defeat.” And at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this month, several speakers mispronounced the vice president’s name.
Defenders say these mispronunciations are meant to emphasize his multiracial background as something frightening.
“I think we should all expect more, from every corner of American civic life. But we should certainly expect more from the halls of Congress,” said Chintan Patel, director of the political empowerment organization Indian American Impact.
When Harris first announced her presidential candidacy in 2019, it didn’t take long for people in the black community to question whether she was “black enough.” Some cited the fact that she is Jamaican, not African-American. Others pointed to her marriage to Doug Emhoff, who is white. Candidate Harris decided to address these accusations head-on by appearing on all-black-hosted radio shows like “The Breakfast Club.”
“I’m black and I’m proud to be black,” Harris, then a U.S. senator, said in the 2019 radio interview. “I was born black. I’m going to die black and I’m not going to make excuses to anyone because they don’t understand.”
Gillespie called such criticism a tired trope, saying Harris has always been part of the black community and the black experience. Gillespie also points to two Zoom conference calls held this week by Black women and Black men, respectively, that raised nearly $3 million.
“The idea that you could bring tens of thousands of black people together on a call that was organized at the last minute to talk about how we’re going to support this presidential candidate, I think says a lot about how grassroots black activists are going to organize in support of her. and how they are organizing and welcoming her as a member of their community,” Gillespie said.
Patel also responded to any notion that Harris is not “Indian enough.” He praised her for supporting Indian American Impact when it launched in 2018.
“She has been a speaker at many community events we have held over the years, across the country. She organized Diwali event celebrations and Eid celebrations at her home,” Patel said. “She really showed up and advocated for South Asian American communities.”
The idea that someone becomes the authority on someone else’s racial identity is reminiscent of the “one-drop rule.” A legal principle rooted in slavery, the so-called rule stated that anyone with even a drop of black lineage could not own land or be free. Creating criteria to validate a multiracial person is useless and harmful, Castillo said.
“Its legitimacy is questioned. It’s something superficial and arbitrary that is super performative,” said Castillo.
What Castillo found helpful was the “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed Persons,” a list published by Maria Root, a renowned clinical psychologist who is also biracial, in 1993. The list contains a dozen statements such as “I have the right to It doesn’t justify my ethnic legitimacy.” Castillo showed it to her daughter after the girl’s friends discussed “what percentage Asian she was versus black.”
“It was also very empowering for me,” Castillo said. “It’s something I’m still trying to practice and be really aware of when I’m in situations where I think people are trying to tell me who I am.”
