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 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 Afro-Jamaican Donald Harris, who came to the United States to study economics, and Shyamala Gopalan, who emigrated from India at 19 to pursue a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology.
They met at the University of California, Berkeley, a hub of student activism, while participating in the civil rights movement—and sometimes brought a toddler, Kamala, to marches.
Donald Harris remains a professor emeritus at Stanford University, while Gopalan, who helped advance breast cancer research, passed away 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 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, proud black women,” Harris wrote.
As a child, Harris was bussed to a newly desegregated elementary school in a wealthier 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 told the Breakfast Club radio show in 2019.
But she has continued to lean into her Indian heritage as well, appearing in a 2019 video in which she and actress Mindy Kaling, also of Indian descent, bonded over making dosas.
“She has embraced her blackness and her Indian heritage as well,” said Kerry Haynie, chair of political science at Duke University, adding that Trump's “race-baiting” 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 his 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, which was founded to support black women. Today, its 360,000 members include leading 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 Howard, Harris enrolled at UC Hastings College of the Law, where she was elected president of the Black Law Students 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 went so far as to call her the “female 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 questioned the authenticity of his African-American experience, and Trump may be using a similar tactic to try to discredit Harris, Clark suggested.
Being black in America, however, has always been a “very broad umbrella” because of the legacy of slavery, Teresa Wiltz wrote in a political op-ed, encompassing “countless iterations of skin color and hair texture and life experiences.”
The most important black political figures in American history have often been mixed race, from abolitionist Frederick Douglass to activist-philosopher Angela Davis, Wiltz noted.
If Harris identifies as black, she “can — and should — take her word for it,” she said.
