WASHINGTON: Former President Donald Trump, who has a long history of inflammatory comments about race, has stepped up his attacks on his 2024 White House rival Kamala Harris, claiming she “accidentally went 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 her blackness long before she embarked on a 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 19 to earn 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 taking toddler Kamala with them to marches.
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. She took them on trips to India and often expressed affection or frustration in Tamil, Kamala wrote in her 2019 book “The Truths We Holds”.
But Gopalan also understood that he was raising two black daughters.
“She knew that her adopted homeland would see me and Maya as black women, and she was determined to make sure we grew up to be confident, proud black women,” Harris wrote.
As a child, Harris 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'm going to die Black,” Harris said on The Breakfast Club radio show in 2019.
But she continued to lean on 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 Native American heritage,” said Kerry Haynie, chair of political science at Duke University, adding that Trump's “race-baiting” was aimed at energizing 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 justice on the US Supreme Court.
She participated in protests against apartheid in South Africa and joined the legendary Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, which was founded to support black women. Today, its 360,000 members include leading figures in politics, art, science and more.
“It's a strong signal of connection 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 — she was elected San Francisco's district attorney in 2003 and California's 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 country's first black president in 2008.
Their biographies have parallels: both are biracial, Obama's father a Kenyan economist and his mother a white American.
Critics have questioned the authenticity of his African-American experience, and Trump may be using similar tactics to try to discredit Harris, Clark suggested.
But being black in America has always been a “very broad umbrella” because of the legacy of slavery, Teresa Wiltz wrote in a Politico op-ed, which includes “countless iterations of skin color and hair texture and life experiences.”
The most prominent 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 word for it,” she said.
