An already bitterly partisan election year has been upended by President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 White House race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. But it’s not just Harris’ late entry that has thrown things into disarray. It’s the history that could be made if the presumptive Democratic nominee becomes the first female president who is also multiracial.
Harris, the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, both of whom immigrated to the US during the civil rights movement, has reaffirmed her historic candidacy for president. spotlights 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 United States, 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 US identified as more than one race, the Census shows.
Yes, she is. Her father, Donald Jasper Harris, a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, is a naturalized American citizen born in Jamaica.
Harris has 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 attend Howard University, a historically black college and university in Washington, D.C. The vice president maintains close ties to her alma mater and its sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.
Being multiracial often means that 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 patients who came to therapy for one issue and eventually opened up about being biracial or multiracial.
“What are the messages that you’ve received from your family, along with the outside world and society?” said Castillo, who is Black and Japanese. “I have more people who are curious to explore that now.”
Every multiracial person’s experience and how they present themselves is different. There’s also no predicting whether someone will decide to stereotype you. Castillo said many people assume she’s part of a “model minority group” because of her Japanese heritage.
Growing up, 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 blacks 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’ Native American heritage did not receive much media attention, and some wonder if that is happening again.
“What I’ve already seen in the last 24 hours is people who advocate for the South Asian community claiming or complaining that their Asian identity is being erased,” said Stephen Caliendo, co-founder and co-director of The Project on Race in Political Communication at North Central College.
“She’s often referred to as a black female candidate,” he said.
From the playground to the workplace, being multiracial can come with challenges. In politics, it can lead to attacks rooted in race rather than policy differences.
The day after Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, Republican Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee called her a “DEI hire” in a TV interview. Conservatives use diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to argue that unqualified people are hired solely on the basis of their race and gender.
But GOP leaders are now urging Republicans to stop racist and sexist attacks for fear of alienating voters.
Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University who has written extensively on black politicians and political mobilization and race, says both racist and sexist tropes were unavoidable for Harris. GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance said at a rally that Harris has only received a government salary during the last 20 years.”
“Kamala Harris was given something that was specifically tailored to the stereotypes about black women,” Gillespie said.
Even seemingly innocuous words from Harris led to what appeared to be racist arguments, Caliendo said. In her first statement after Biden’s withdrawal, Harris announced, “My intention is to earn and win this nomination.” Soon, some Republican officials joked that she had earned nothing.
“It plays into a stereotype of undeserving members of minority groups, particularly women, a ‘welfare queen,’” Caliendo said. “She feels entitled to something she hasn’t earned. She uses it as an inoculation against what she expects.”
Conservatives have also mangled Harris’s first name, leading to 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 his “new victim to defeat.” And at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this month, several speakers mispronounced the vice president’s name.
According to proponents, these misstatements are meant to highlight her multiracial background as something scary.
“I think we should all expect more, from all corners of American civic life. But we should certainly expect more from the halls of Congress,” said Chintan Patel, executive 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 pointed to 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 going on all-black 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 for anybody because they don’t understand.”
Gillespie called such criticism a tired cliché, saying Harris has always rightly been a part of the Black community and the Black experience. Gillespie also pointed to two Zoom calls this week, held by Black women and Black men respectively, that raised nearly $3 million.
“The idea that you could get tens of thousands of Black people on a last-minute organized call to talk about how we’re going to support this presidential candidate speaks volumes about how Black activists are going to organize in support of her and how they organize and embrace her as a member of their community,” Gillespie said.
Patel also responded to the notion that Harris isn’t “Indian enough,” praising her for her support of Indian American Impact when it launched in 2018.
“She’s given the keynote address at a lot of community events that we’ve had over the years, all over the country. She’s hosted Diwali events and Eid celebrations in her home,” Patel said. “She’s really been a presence and advocate for the South Asian American communities.”
The idea that someone becomes the authority over 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 ancestry could not own land or be free. Creating criteria to validate a multiracial person is pointless and hurtful, Castillo said.
“Your legitimacy is being questioned. It’s something so superficial, arbitrary that’s super performative,” Castillo said.
What Castillo found useful is the “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People,” a list published in 1993 by Maria Root, a renowned clinical psychologist who is also biracial. The list includes a dozen statements, such as “I have the right not to justify my ethnic legitimacy.” Castillo showed it to her daughter after the girl’s friends had an argument about “what percent Asian she was versus what percent black she was.”
“It’s also been super empowering for me,” Castillo said. “It’s something that I still try to practice and really think about when I’m in situations where I think people are trying to tell me who I am.”
