WASHINGTON: Former president Donald Trump, who has a long history of making harsh comments on race, has stepped up his attacks on 2024 White House rival Kamala Harris, claiming she “accidentally turned black” for political advantage.
But the truth is that the vice president, the product of an interracial marriage between Jamaican and Indian immigrants, has embraced her blackness even before she began her public service career.
Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964 to Donald Harris, an African-Jamaican 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, the center of student activism, while participating in the civil rights movement, sometimes bringing toddler Kamala along with them.
Donald Harris remains an emeritus professor at Stanford University, while Gopalan, who helped promote breast cancer research, died 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 her love or frustration in Tamil, Kamala wrote in her 2019 book “The Truths We Hold.”
But Gopalan also understands that she is raising two black daughters.
“She knew that the home she chose would see Maya and me as young black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow up to be confident and proud black women,” Harris wrote.
As a child, Harris was sent to a newly desegregated primary school in a wealthy white neighborhood and attended black church on Sundays.
“I am black, and I am proud to be black, and I was born black, and I will die black,” Harris said on The Breakfast Club radio show in 2019.
But she's continued to carry on her Indian heritage, appearing in a 2019 video in which she and actress Mindy Kaling, who is also of Indian descent, bonded over making dosa.
“She embraces her blackness and her Indian heritage as well,” said Kerry Haynie, chair of the political science department at Duke University, adding that Trump’s “racist” attacks were aimed at galvanizing his own base.
When it came time to attend college, Harris chose Howard University, a historic 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 fraternity, which was formed to support black women. Today, its 360,000 members include prominent figures in 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 graduating from Howard, Harris attended UC Hastings College of the Law, where she was elected president of the Black Law Students Association.
As she progressed in her career — being elected San Francisco District Attorney in 2003 and California Attorney General in 2010 — she was consistently identified as black or African-American in media reports.
Some have even dubbed her the “female Obama” after Barack Obama, who was elected the country’s first black president in 2008.
Their biographies are similar. Both are mixed-race, with Obama's father being a Kenyan economist and his mother being a white American.
Critics have questioned the authenticity of his experiences as an African-American, and Trump could use similar tactics to try to discredit Harris, Clark suggested.
However, being black in America has always been a “very broad spectrum” because of the legacy of slavery, Teresa Wiltz wrote in a Politico editorial, covering “a wide range of skin colors, hair textures and life experiences.”
The most significant black political figures in U.S. history have often been mixed-race, from abolitionist Frederick Douglass to philosopher and activist Angela Davis, Wiltz said.
If Harris identifies as black, “we can — and should — take her word for it,” she said.
