WASHINGTON: Former President Donald Trump, who has a history of making inflammatory comments on race, has escalated his attacks on his 2024 White House rival Kamala Harris, claiming she “accidentally turned black for political reasons.”
In fact, the vice president, who was born to a marriage between Jamaican and Indian immigrants, embraced her blackness long before beginning her 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 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 – sometimes even taking little Kamala to demonstrations.
Donald Harris is still a professor emeritus at Stanford University, while Gopalan, who advanced breast cancer research, died in 2009.
After the couple's divorce, Gopalan raised Kamala and her younger sister Maya, instilling in them pride in their South Asian roots. She took them on trips to India and often expressed her affection or frustration in Tamil, Kamala wrote in her 2019 book, “The Truths We Hold.”
But Gopalan was also aware that she was raising two black daughters.
“She knew that Maya and I would be seen as black girls in her adopted home, and she was determined to make sure we grew up to be confident, proud black women,” Harris wrote.
As a child, Harris took the bus to a newly desegregated elementary school in a wealthier white neighborhood and attended a black church on Sundays.
“I am black and I am proud to be black. I was born black and I will die black,” Harris said on the radio show The Breakfast Club in 2019.
But she continues to draw on her Indian heritage, appearing in a 2019 video in which she and actress Mindy Kaling, also of Indian descent, joined forces to make dosas.
“She stands by her black identity and also her Native American heritage,” said Kerry Haynie, chair of political science at Duke University, adding that Trump's “racist” attacks were aimed at mobilizing his own base.
When it came time for college, Harris chose Howard University, a historically black educational institution in the U.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 famous Alpha Kappa Alpha fraternity, which was founded to support black women. Its 360,000 members today include leading figures in politics, the arts, science and more.
“It sends a strong message of solidarity with African Americans,” said Christopher Clark, a professor of political science 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.
Throughout her career—she was elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003 and attorney general of California in 2010—she was consistently identified in media reports as black or African American.
Some even went so far as to call her the “female Obama,” after Barack Obama, who was elected the first black president of the United States in 2008.
Their biographies have parallels: Both are mixed race: Obama's father is a Kenyan economist and his mother is a white American.
Critics have questioned the authenticity of his African-American heritage and Trump may be trying to use a similar tactic to discredit Harris, Clark suspects.
However, because of the legacy of slavery, the term “black” in America has always been a “very broad term,” Teresa Wiltz wrote in an opinion piece for Politico, encompassing “countless variations of skin color, hair texture and life experiences.”
The most important black politicians in U.S. history were often mixed race, from abolitionist Frederick Douglass to activist and philosopher Angela Davis, Wiltz noted.
If Harris identifies as black, “we can and should believe her,” she said.
