WASHINGTON: Former President Donald Trump, who has a long history of making inflammatory comments about race, has stepped up his attacks on his 2024 White House rival Kamala Harris, saying she “accidentally became black” for political gain.
But the reality is that the vice president, the product of a mixed-race marriage between Jamaican and Indian immigrants, embraced his Blackness long before he began his career in public service.
Harris was born in Oakland, California in 1964 to Donald Harris, an Afro-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, a center of student activism, while participating in the civil rights movement — and sometimes even took little Kamala with them to marches.
Donald Harris remains a professor emeritus at Stanford University, while Gopalan, who pioneered 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 with her on trips to India and often expressed affection or frustration in Tamil, Kamala wrote in her 2019 book, Truths We Keep.
But Hapalan also understood that she was raising two black daughters.
“She knew her adopted homeland would see Maya and I as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we grew up to be confident, proud black women,” Harris wrote.
As a child, Garris was bussed to a newly desegregated elementary school in a more affluent 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'll die black,” Harris said on The Breakfast Club radio show in 2019.
But she also continued to draw on her Indian heritage, appearing in a 2019 video where she and actress Mindy Kaling, also of Indian descent, bonded over dosas.
“She also embraced her blackness and her Native American heritage,” said Carrie Haney, chair of the political science department at Duke University, adding that Trump's “racial vitriol” attacks were aimed at energizing his own base.
When it came time to go to 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 attended protests against apartheid in South Africa and joined the famous Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, founded to support black women. Today, its 360,000 members include leading figures in politics, art, science and more.
“It's a powerful signal of solidarity with black Americans,” said Christopher Clark, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
After Howard, Harris attended the University of California, Hastings College of Law, where she was elected president of the Black Law Student Association.
As her career progressed—elected as San Francisco's district attorney in 2003 and California's attorney general in 2010—she was consistently referred to as black or African-American in media reports.
Some have gone so far as to call her the “female Obama” after Barack Obama, who was elected the nation's first black president in 2008.
There are parallels in their biographies: both are biracial, Obama's father is a Kenyan economist, and his mother is a white American.
Critics have questioned the authenticity of his African-American background, and Trump could use similar tactics to try to discredit Harris, Clark suggested.
Still, being black in America has always been a “very broad umbrella” because of the legacy of slavery, Theresa Wilts wrote in Politico, encompassing “myriad iterations of skin color and hair texture and life experience.”
The most important black political figures in US history have often been mixed-race, from abolitionist Frederick Douglass to activist-philosopher Angela Davis, Wilts noted.
If Harris identifies as Black, “we can — and should — take her word for it,” she said.
