The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Trump is Wrong (and Offensive) re Harris's Racial/Ethnic Identity
Given Donald Trump's recent remarks about Kamala Harris' racial/ethnic identity, it's an unfortunate coincidence that I posted something earlier this week noting that Harris once emphasized her Indian heritage more.
So just to formally disassociate myself from Trump's views, no, I do NOT think that Harris is faking a black identity, and the fact that she once gave more public attention to the Indian part of her heritage as part of her political persona does NOT mean that she is insincere in also having a black identity.
And it's quite silly and offensive to say she can't identify with *both* her black and Indian heritages. And she has! From what I can tell, from the earliest point in her public career she was quite forthright in stating that her (largely absent) father was black, her mother was Indian, and that her mother took pains to raise her with exposure to both cultures and identities.
Not surprisingly, she emphasizes one or the other publicly depending on the context--doing an Indian cooking segment with Mindy Kaling vs. speaking to a gathering of her historically black college sorority, for example. And of course sometimes there is political salience to emphasizing one identity or another. But she's is, after all, a politician, so she should be expected to act like one!
As the author of a book about modern racial classification in the US, one thing I've noted is that she rarely if ever refers to herself as "multiracial." That's also quite understandable. A 'multiracial' movement gained steam in the US in the early 1990s, powered primary by young activists with one black and one non-black parent. One thing that particularly irked them was that not only could you not check "multiracial" on the Census and other federal forms (you still can't), but you had to choose only one racial box to check, you could not check "Asian American" and "Black," for example (now you can, since 1997). But when Harris came of age a bit before this was a "thing," so it's not surprising that she doesn't use the multiracial nomenclature.
UPDATE: Here is Trump's statement, made during an interview at a conference of black journalists: "I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now, she wants to be known as Black. So, I don't know, is she Indian or is she Black?… she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went -- she became a Black person." I suppose Trump is also a product of his times, when you had to "choose" one identity, at least officially, but I suspect that it more comes down to him trying to turn a segment of black voters against her by falsely suggesting that she's exploiting a black heritage that she previously neglected.
