As a woman of color who has spent my whole life fighting bigotry, I didn’t think I could be more offended by the candidate running for president at the top of the Republican ticket. But then, the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) made former President Donald Trump sit on a stage with three Black women journalists, where he illustrated the full extent of his racist xenophobia. Trump made many offensive remarks in that appearance Wednesday in Chicago; chief among the triggers for me was the way he questioned the racial identity of Vice President Kamala Harris, who has now enough delegate votes to secure the Democratic presidential nomination and is soon expected to officially become the first Black woman and the first Indian woman to head a major party’s ticket.
I left Jamaica as a woman of both Black and Asian heritage. I knew myself, without controversy, to be biracial. Then I arrived in the United States, where I was only Black.
Trump said, “She was … of Indian heritage…until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black.” He then asked "Is she Indian or is she Black?” It’s incredible that in 2024, he asked that question — as if she couldn’t possibly be both.
Harris’ background is well documented. Her father is a Black Jamaican. Her mother was Indian. Thirty-eight years ago, she graduated from Howard University, an HBCU, where she pledged the country’s oldest Black sorority.
Trump remains trapped in the era in America in which people were expected to have a single racial identity. And, to be clear, that time was not so long ago. As recently as 1997, I left Jamaica as a woman of both Black and Asian heritage. I knew myself, without controversy, to be biracial. Then I arrived in the United States, where I was only Black.
Suddenly, I found myself explaining my Chinese surname to white people who questioned me about it. If the conversation went further, then I had to make the case for identifying as both Black and Chinese. This reality was starkly different from my experience back home, where my Asian heritage was not in opposition to my Black heritage. In post-colonial Black Jamaica, being mixed carried some measure of privilege — it also came with some derision, but never, ever, denial. Everyone there accepted me as Black and Asian. In the United States, I was expected to be Black or Asian.
In a 2019 interview on “The Breakfast Club,” Harris said it herself: “I’m Black, and I’m proud of being Black. I was born Black, I will die Black, and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”
Trump has seized upon a video of her in the kitchen with the Indian American actress Mindy Kaling in which Harris enthusiastically affirms Kaling’s description of her as Indian and tells the actress, “You look like the entire one half of my family.” Kaling says, “I’ve been telling people we’re related already. This is perfect.”
In a social media post, Trump says Harris “is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony. She uses everybody, including her racial identity!”
Trump seeks to take the power of belonging to both Black and Indian cultures from Harris. He attempts to delegitimize her by insisting that belonging to both makes her some sort of traitor, somehow deviant, freakish, abnormal.
Trump is tapping into a disturbingly pervasive American belief in a racial binary, that you’ve got to be one thing or another.
Black folks all over the world know our community is of mixed-racial heritage. We understand that the one-drop rule, which says that anybody with one drop of Black blood is Black, is, at its core, reductive. That rule was meant to exclude Black people from the privileges afforded only to those possessing the visible quality of whiteness; being of mixed race often denied you a white heritage, but your Black racial identity was never contested. It was always yours to keep, perhaps because no one inside the racist patriarchy could imagine anyone else wanting it.
Trump is tapping into a disturbingly pervasive American belief in a racial binary, that you’ve got to be one thing or another.
But in the present political climate where the percentage of white voters is shrinking — Harris being doubly of color makes Trump nervous. That she could excite Black voters to the extent that they were excited when Barack Obama ran for president is making the party of white nationalism nervous. That she could consolidate the Indian American vote makes her a double threat. That she could inspire women to turn out this November makes her a virtual atomic bomb to the GOP.
Historically, people of color had to be whatever white people said we were. Now that they’re afraid that being a person of color may provide some limited benefit, they wish to intimate that race is something mutable, subject to flights of fancy. It is terrifyingly revealing, that the practice of racial exclusivity, which Black people had nothing to do with, is being refashioned into a weapon against Harris in the moment when her blackness could be of some benefit to her and the community that supports her bid for the presidency.
James Baldwin, who was born 100 years ago this month, said it best, “We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
Trump’s comments deny the humanity of biracial people and challenges our right to exist. He bugles a call being taken up by many who follow his lead.
The day Biden endorsed Harris for president, I posted on Instagram, “OMG!!! We got a Black Woman in the US presidential election!”
In no time, there were more than 500 comments from the MAGA camp denying Harris’ Blackness, berating her as the unqualified DEI hire and accusing me of being racist. Multiple people reported the post as offensive. Some directly messaged me to ask how I would feel if they had posted about a white man running for president. When my answer did not suffice, I was dismissed as a “dumb coconut” who didn’t deserve to vote because I didn’t have the good sense to see through a candidate who was pretending to be Black to get my vote.
Unless they look white and are trying hard to pass, nobody’s Blackness in America is invisible.
Pretending to be Black. Unless they look white and are trying hard to pass, nobody’s Blackness in America is invisible. To suggest that Blackness is a cloak that Harris can put on and remove at will is to discredit the experience of millions of voting Americans who navigate the pitfalls of racial oppression daily.
What his off-the-rails performance at the NABJ convention illustrates is Trump’s inability to come to terms with the changing face of the Unites States of America. Trump, the MAGA candidate, longs for the good old days when he could, at least before he got sued by the Justice Department, bar Black people from renting his properties.
He is angry at a world that dares to proffer a Black woman, an Indian woman, as a serious contender for president. He does not wish to live in this new, emerging America. That’s one of many reasons he should not be elected to lead it.