WASHINGTON: Former President Donald Trump, who has a long history of making incendiary comments about race, has stepped up his attacks on his 2024 White House rival Kamala Harris, saying she “went black” for political gain.
But the reality is that the vice president, the product of a mixed-race marriage between Jamaican and Indian immigrants, embraced her identity as a black woman long before embarking 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 age 19 to pursue 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 bringing their daughter Kamala along to the 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’s divorce, 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 affection or frustration in Tamil, Kamala wrote in her 2019 book, “The Truths We Hold.”
But Gopalan also knew he was raising two black daughters.
“She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to ensure that we grew into confident, proud Black women,” Harris wrote.
As a child, Harris was bused to a newly desegregated elementary school in a wealthier white neighborhood, and on Sundays he attended an all-black church.
“I am black and I am proud of it, I was born black and I will die black,” Harris told The Breakfast Club radio show in 2019.
But she has continued to draw inspiration from her Indian roots, too, appearing in a 2019 video in which she and actress Mindy Kaling, who is also of Indian origin, bonded over dosa.
“He also embraced his blackness and his Indian heritage,” said Kerry Haynie, chair of political science at Duke University, adding that Trump’s “racist” attacks were aimed at galvanizing his own base.
When it came time to enroll in college, Harris chose Howard University, a historically black institution in the nation's capital, following in the footsteps of her hero Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
She participated in protests against apartheid in South Africa and joined the legendary Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, founded to support black women. Today, its 360,000 members include prominent figures in politics, the arts, science, and more.
“It’s a powerful signal of alignment with African Americans,” said Christopher Clark, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
After Howard, Harris attended law school at the University of California at Hastings, where she was elected president of the Black Law Students Association.
Throughout her career (elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003 and California attorney general in 2010), she has consistently been identified in media reports as black or African-American.
Some have even gone so far as to nickname it “Female Obama,” in honor of Barack Obama, who was elected in 2008 as the nation's first black president.
Their biographies have parallels: both are biracial: Obama's father is a Kenyan economist and his mother is a white American.
Critics have questioned the authenticity of her African-American experience, and Trump may use a similar tactic to try to discredit Harris, Clark suggested.
Yet being black in America has always been a “very broad umbrella” because of the legacy of slavery, Teresa Wiltz wrote in a Politico opinion piece, encompassing “myriad iterations of skin color, 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 and philosopher Angela Davis, Wiltz observed.
If Harris identifies as black, “we can — and should — take her word for it,” he said.
