WASHINGTON: Former President Donald Trump, who has a long history of making inflammatory comments about race, has stepped up his attack on his 2024 White House rival Kamala Harris by claiming she “became 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 his blackness before embarking on a career in public service.
Harris was born in Oakland, California, to Donald Harris, an Afro-Jamaican who came to the United States in 1964 to study economics, and Shyamala Gopalan, who came from India at the age of 19 to pursue a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology.
They met at the University of California, Berkeley, a center for student activism, participating in the civil rights movement — and sometimes even taking a toddler, Kamala, to marches.
Donald Harris remains a professor emeritus at Stanford University, while Gopalan, who helped advance breast cancer research, died in 2009.
After the couple's divorce, Gopalan raised Kamala and her younger sister Maya with pride in their South Asian roots. He took them on tours of 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 that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we grew up to be confident, proud black women,” Harris wrote.
As a child, Harris attended a newly segregated elementary school in an affluent 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 said on The Breakfast Club radio show in 2019.
But she's also leaning into her Indian heritage, appearing in a 2019 video where she and Indian-origin actress Mindy Kaling bond over dosa-making.
“She also embraces her blackness and her Indian heritage,” said Carey Haney, 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 her hero Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice on the US Supreme Court.
She participated in anti-apartheid protests in South Africa and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, founded to support black women. Today, its 360,000 members include prominent figures in politics, art, 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 Law, where she was elected president of the Black Law Student Association.
As he progressed through his career — elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003 and California attorney general in 2010 — he was consistently identified as black or African American in media reports.
After Barack Obama was elected the nation's first black president in 2008, some dubbed her “female Obama.”
Their biographies are parallel: both are biracial, Obama's father a Kenyan economist and his mother a white American.
Critics have questioned the authenticity of her African American experience, and Trump may be using a similar tactic to try to discredit Harris, Clarke suggested.
However, being black in America has always been a “much broader umbrella” because of the legacy of slavery, Teresa Wiltz wrote in a Politico op-ed, encompassing “innumerable iterations of skin color and hair texture and life experiences.”
The most important black political figures in American history were often of mixed race, from abolitionist Frederick Douglass to activist-philosopher Angela Davis, Wiltz noted.
If Harris identifies as black, “we can — and should — take her word for it,” she said.
