Almost 60 years ago, on October 20, 1964, Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California.
That day, the moment she took her first breath, the future vice president of the United States became black. Harris was black when she was in kindergarten in Berkeley, California, and bused into a white neighborhood as part of the city’s desegregation program. Harris was black when the woman who ran her daycare decorated the walls with pictures of abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.
Harris was black when she enrolled at Howard University, an HBCU in Washington, D.C., and she was black when she became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the oldest black sorority in the country. Harris was black when she became district attorney of San Francisco, black when she was attorney general of California, black when she was elected to the U.S. Senate, black when she was Joe Biden’s running mate, and black when she was sworn in as vice president of the United States.
And she will remain black until she dies.
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” Harris wrote in “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” her 2019 memoir. “She knew that her adopted home would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow up to be confident, proud black women.”
This was intended to set the record straight, as if there was ever anything wrong with Harris’s portrayal of ethnic identity.
Any doubts about her black heritage are the evil work of Donald Trump, the former president who tried the same maneuver with Barack Obama. For years, Trump spread the lie that Obama was foreign-born – an evil, racist conspiracy theory aimed at undermining the United States’ first black president.
Trump is reviving this strategy, suggesting that Harris only recently began identifying as black – and to a group of black journalists, of all people.
Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, took the morally correct path. “Donald Trump has already proven that he cannot unite America,” said a statement from Harris’ campaign team. “So he is trying to divide us.”
Harris’ Indian heritage lets her identify as Southeast Asian, proof that in America, many people check more than one box. There’s even dual citizenship, as evidenced by NBA stars like Joel Embiid, the Cameroon-born Philadelphia 76ers center who holds French and U.S. passports and is a member of the U.S. men’s basketball team at the Olympics.
You can be more than one thing and you don’t always have to choose.
Which brings us to our other recent Trump controversy. Before Trump ignited a firestorm at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention, members were divided over whether the former president should even be invited. The convention’s co-chair, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, even resigned her post as convention chair in protest of the invitation.
This seems at odds with our mission as journalists, which is to hold Trump accountable – as we would any candidate – and expose the lies. Mission accomplished.
Harris was unable to attend due to a scheduling conflict, her campaign said. Had she been able to attend, she would have rightly faced a round of tough questioning and would not have been granted a pass because she is black.
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