As Kamala Harris took the stage Thursday night for the biggest speech of her political life, she addressed the nation as an African American woman, despite the fact that one of her parents isn’t Black and both of them are immigrants. But while her identity has been clear since she chose a historically Black college and joined a famed Black sorority, those complexifying facts deserve some consideration because they reveal what barriers Harris will forever shatter while outlining those that will remain.
If — I hope when — she becomes president, Harris will be only the second Black person in American history to hold the office. Neither had a Black ancestor scarred by slavery on American soil. Barack Obama, too, is biracial with an immigrant father from Kenya, while Harris’ parents hail from Jamaica and India. Obama was raised primarily by his white mother and Harris, as she said in her speech Thursday night, was raised primarily by her Indian mother.
Obama touched on his ancestry in Tuesday’s speech, joking about how he and President Joe Biden shared “common Irish blood.” But I wonder whether the fact that two of America’s most prominent national leaders are the children of immigrants is more than an amusing quirk of history, but might say something important about how much work Americans still must do to bury the legacy of that “peculiar institution.” Are there barriers that African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved here face in becoming president that Black immigrants do not?
The two leaders’ ancestry is quite the long shot. A tiny percentage of African Americans are biracial children of immigrants. If you picked two one after another out of a crowd, the chances would be less than 1 in 1,000. To have it happen by chance with presidents is absurd.
The question is whether this coincidence says something about voters or something about the two and how they were raised.
For all Americans leery of dealing with the legacy of slavery, picking Black presidents without that history gives us the opportunity to avoid dealing with it, while at the same time patting ourselves on the back for getting past it.
It is quite convenient to have slavery-free African American presidents. No messy genealogy to get into. No spotlight on the practice of slavery in a particular Southern state. No painful documents marking the sale of relatives. Nobody has to be uncomfortable.
Indeed, both Obama’s and Harris’ families immigrated to the United States in the civil rights era when Jim Crow was coming to an end and official school segregation was a decade in the rearview mirror. We need ask no uncomfortable questions about how their families were victimized in the decades when slavery was dead, but the Black-white color line was policed with deadly zeal.
In a more positive light, the story of Black immigrants is similar to the one white and Hispanic voters tell themselves about their own families, giving Obama and Harris an intimate connection that African Americans with deeper roots in the United States often lack. The story Harris told of her mother’s journey to the United States with a dream to cure breast cancer sounded like it could have been an Italian or a German story, too.
Alternatively, the ascent of Obama and Harris may tell us less about voters than it tells us what is unique and valuable about immigrant families. Harris was raised by two highly educated parents who made education central in the lives of their daughters, and who were married when she was born. She was raised by an extended family, who told her she “could be anything and do anything” in her mother’s adopted home.
That is in stark contrast to the common narrative in America where children are told of victimhood, systemic racism and helplessness in families where 63% live in single-parent households and education is too often neglected or substandard even among the growing number of Black Americans who graduate from failing public schools.
Harris and Obama both offer compelling stories about abounding opportunities in America for immigrants and their children, but their presence at the pinnacle of American society may have less to say about their racial peers whose families have been here far longer.
Kamala Harris and Barack Obama have shattered barriers for African Americans who now know that someone who looks like them can be president of a nation that once held slaves — but the barrier between the descendants of the enslaved and the highest offices in the land remains.
David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com