Kamala Harris said in 2019 that she is proud to be black (archive).
Washington:
Former President Donald Trump, who has a long history of making incendiary comments about race, has stepped up his attacks on his 2024 White House rival Kamala Harris, claiming she “happened to turn black” to gain political advantage.
But the reality is that the vice president, the product of a mixed-race marriage between Jamaican and Indian immigrants, embraced her blackness long before embarking on a career in public service.
‘I’m proud to be black’
Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964, the son of Afro-Jamaican Donald Harris, who came to the United States to study economics, and Shyamala Gopalan, who emigrated from India at age 19 to pursue a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology.
They met at the University of California, Berkeley, a center for student activism, while participating in the civil rights movement — and sometimes even taking little Kamala to marches.
Donald Harris remains professor emeritus at Stanford University, while Gopalan, who helped advance breast cancer research, passed away in 2009.
After the couple divorced, Gopalan raised Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, instilling pride in their South Asian roots. She took them on trips to India and often expressed affection or frustration in Tamil, Kamala wrote in her 2019 book, “The Truths We Hold.”
But Gopalan also understood that she was raising two black daughters.
“She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls and was determined to ensure that we became confident and proud Black women,” Harris wrote.
As a child, Harris was bused to a recently desegregated elementary school in a wealthier white neighborhood and attended a black church on Sundays.
“I’m black and I’m proud to be black, and I was born black, I’m going to die black,” Harris told The Breakfast Club radio show in 2019.
But she’s also continued to lean into her Indian heritage, appearing in a 2019 video where she and actress Mindy Kaling, also of Indian descent, teamed up to make dosas.
“She also embraced her blackness and her Indian heritage,” said Kerry Haynie, professor of political science at Duke University, adding that Trump’s “race-baiting” attacks were aimed at galvanizing his own base.
Howard University and the ‘Obama woman’
When it was time for college, Harris chose Howard University, a historically black institution in the US capital, following in the footsteps of her hero Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice on the US Supreme Court.
She participated in anti-apartheid protests in South Africa and joined the famous Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, founded to support black women. Today, its 360,000 members include leading figures from politics, the arts, science and more.
“It’s a powerful signal of alignment with black Americans,” said Christopher Clark, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
After Howard, Harris enrolled at UC Hastings College of the Law, where she was elected president of the Black Law Students Association.
As she progressed in her career – elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003 and attorney general of California in 2010 – she was consistently identified as black or African American in media reports.
Some went so far as to nickname her “female Obama”, in honor of Barack Obama, who was elected the country’s first black president in 2008.
Their biographies have parallels: both are biracial, with Obama’s father being a Kenyan economist and his mother being a white American.
Critics have questioned the authenticity of her African-American experience, and Trump may be using a similar tactic to try to discredit Harris, Clark suggested.
However, being black in America has always been a “very broad umbrella” due to the legacy of slavery, Teresa Wiltz wrote in a Politico article, encompassing “myriad iterations of skin color, hair texture, and life experiences ”.
The most important black political figures in U.S. history have often been mixed race, from abolitionist Frederick Douglass to activist philosopher Angela Davis, Wiltz noted.
If Harris identifies as black, “we can — and should — take her at her word,” she said.
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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