Kamala Harris has America focused on multiracial identity

An election year that was already bitterly partisan has been completely upended by President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 White House race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. But it’s not just Harris’s late entry that has electrified things. It’s also the history to be made if the likely Democratic nominee becomes the first female president who is also multiracial.

The daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, both of whom immigrated to the U.S. during the Civil Rights Movement, Harris’s historic presidential bid has again put a spotlight on 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 U.S., with its slavery-molded history, 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 U.S. identified as being more than one race, according to the census.

Yes, she is. Her father Donald Jasper Harris, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, is a naturalized U.S. 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 go to Howard University, a historically Black college and university in Washington, D.C. The vice president maintains close ties to her alma mater and to her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.

Being multiracial often means 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 with patients who come for therapy for one issue and end up talking about being biracial or multiracial.

“What are the messages that you’ve received from your family along with the outside community and society?” said Castillo, who is Black and Japanese. “I have more people who are curious about exploring that now.”

Every multiracial person’s experience and how they choose to present themselves is different. There’s also no predicting if someone decides to stereotype you. Castillo said many people assume she is a member of a “model minority” group because of her Japanese heritage.

Growing up, however, her Asian mother was afraid how Castillo would be treated if people saw her as Black.

“She knew a bit about the discrimination that African-Americans, Blacks, have faced in America,” Castillo said.

Yes, she is. Her late mother Shyamala Gopalan, a biomedical scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was born in India.

In 2020, there was criticism that Harris' Indian heritage wasn't given much media attention. Some wonder if that's happening again.

“What I’ve already seen just in the last 24 hours is folks who are advocates for the South Asian community arguing or complaining that her Asian-ness is getting 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 woman candidate,” he said.

From the playground to the workplace, being multiracial can be fraught with challenges. In politics, it can spark attacks rooted in race instead of policy disagreements.

The day after Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket, Tennessee Republican Rep. Tim Burchett called her a “DEI hire” in a TV interview. Conservatives have been using diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to argue that unqualified people get hired solely based on their race and gender.

But, GOP leaders are now urging Republicans to lay off racist and sexist attacks for fear of alienating voters.

Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University who has written extensively about Black politicians and political mobilization and race, says both racist and sexist tropes were inevitable for Harris. GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance said at a rally that Harris has been only ”collecting a government paycheck for the last 20 years.”

“Kamala Harris got something that was especially tailored to stereotypes about Black women,” Gillespie said.

Even seemingly innocuous words from Harris sparked what seemed like racist arguments, Caliendo said. In her first statement after Biden's withdrawal, Harris announced “my intention is to earn and win this nomination.” Very quickly, some Republican officials quipped that she hadn't earned anything.

“It plays into a stereotype of undeserving members of minority groups, particularly women, ‘welfare queen’ kind of thing,” Caliendo said. “She feels entitled to something that she hasn’t earned. She's using it as an inoculation against what she expects.”

Conservatives have also butchered Harris' first name, igniting accusations of racism and disrespect. Kamala (KAH’-mah-lah) means lotus in Sanskrit. In his first rally since Harris became the likely 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.

Supporters say these mispronunciations are meant to stress her multiracial background as something scary.

“I think we should all expect more, from all corners of American civic life. But certainly we should expect more from the halls of Congress,” said Chintan Patel, director of the political empowerment organization Indian American Impact.

When Harris announced her presidential candidacy the first time in 2019, it didn't take long for people in the Black community to question if she was “Black enough.” Some cited the fact 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-hosted radio shows like “The Breakfast Club."

“I’m black, and I’m proud of being black,” Harris, then a U.S. senator, said in the 2019 radio interview. “I was born black. I will die black, and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”

Gillespie called such a criticism a tired trope, saying Harris has always rightfully been a part of the Black community and the Black experience. Gillespie also points to the two Zoom calls held this week 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 call that was organized at the last minute to talk about how are we going to support this presidential candidate, I think speaks volumes to how black grassroots activists are going to organize in support of her and how they’re organizing and embracing her as a member of their community,” Gillespie said.

Patel also hit back at any notion that Harris is not “Indian enough.” He praised her for supporting Indian American Impact when it launched in 2018.

“She has keynoted at many community events that we’ve had across the years, across the country. She's hosted Diwali event celebrations, Eid celebrations at her home,” Patel said. “She’s really showed up and championed South Asian American communities.”

The idea that someone gets to be the authority on someone else's racial identity is reminiscent of the “one-drop rule.” A legal principle rooted in slavery, the so-called rule determined anyone with even a drop of Black lineage could not own land or be free. To come up with criteria to validate a multiracial person is pointless and hurtful, Castillo said.

“Your legitimacy is questioned. It’s like this superficial, arbitrary stuff that’s like super performative," Castillo said.

What Castillo has found helpful is the “Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People," a list published by Maria Root, a renowned clinical psychologist who is also bi-racial, in 1993. The list contains a dozen declarations such as “I have the right not to justify my ethnic legitimacy." Castillo showed it to her daughter after the girl's friends argued “what percentage Asian she was versus Black.”

“It’s also been super-empowering for me,” Castillo said. “It’s something that I still am trying to practice and really be thoughtful about when I’m in situations in which I think people are trying to tell me who I am.”