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, claiming she “happened to be black” for political advantage .
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 a career in public service.
Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964 to 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 her 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 taking a baby Kamala to the march.
Donald Harris remains a professor emeritus at Stanford University, while Gopalan, who helped advance 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. He took them on trips to India and often expressed his 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 her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we grew into confident and proud black women,” Harris wrote.
As a child, Harris was bussed to a recently 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 embrace her Indian heritage, appearing in a 2019 video in which she and actress Mindy Kaling, also of Indian descent, bonded to do dos.
“She embraced her Blackness and her Indian heritage,” said Kerry Haynie, director of political science at Duke University, adding that Trump's attacks were aimed at galvanizing his own base.
When it came 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 US Supreme Court justice.
She participated in 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, the arts, science and more.
“It's a strong 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 Law, where she was elected president of the Black Law Student Association.
As she progressed through her career — 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 gone so far as to call her “Woman Obama” after Barack Obama, who was elected the nation's first black president in 2008.
Their biographies have parallels: both are biracial, with Obama's father a Kenyan economist and his mother a white American.
Critics have questioned the authenticity of his African-American background, and Trump could use a similar tactic to try to discredit Harris, Clark suggested.
However, being black in America has always been a “very broad umbrella” thanks to the legacy of slavery, Teresa Wiltz wrote in a Politico op-ed, encompassing “countless iterations of skin color and hair texture and life experiences.”
The most important black political figures in US history have often been of 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.
