Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee, is facing a reprisal of attacks from some conservatives and their surrogates on her racial and cultural heritage, ethnic background and gender.
A list recently shared across social media titled “Kamala Harris Facts,” contains wrong or missing-context claims about her background, including that she is “Not African American — Indian & Jamaican.” These attacks — similar to ones raised when she was named President Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020 — misrepresent Harris’ heritage.
On television and social media, some people have also falsely and repeatedly claimed Harris isn’t eligible for the presidency because of her family’s immigrant background. Harris was born in 1964 in Oakland, California, and as someone born in the U.S., is constitutionally eligible to be president.
All of this reflects a poor understanding of history and the fluid nature and various interpretations of racial identity in the United States, race and politics experts say.
“The approach to Harris in this instance, the attempt to ‘other’ her, is a common practice in American politics,” said Keneshia Grant, a political science professor at Howard University. “These tactics will continue because they work. People have to prepare themselves to check their own biases and fears and use logic and facts to guide their decision-making when these kinds of attacks occur.”
According to a October 2022 report by the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that seeks to advance civil rights and liberties in technology, women of color candidates in the 2020 general elections “were twice as likely as other candidates to be targeted with or be the subject of mis- and disinformation, and more likely to receive sexist and racist abuse than any other group.”
We consulted experts in Caribbean and Africana studies, political science professors and anthropologists to learn more about how Harris’ gender, multicultural and multiracial background offers a unique glimpse into how American politics grapples with issues of race and identity.
Harris’ background: From California to Canada and back again
Harris grew up in a Black middle-class neighborhood in Berkeley, California, where her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris and father, Donald Harris, would often join civil rights protests.
Donald Harris was born in Jamaica and immigrated to the U.S. after he got into the University of California, Berkeley, Kamala Harris wrote in her autobiography, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.” Shyamala Gopalan Harris was born in Chennai, India, and moved to California after graduating from the University of Delhi to pursue a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology at Berkeley.
The couple separated around the time Harris was 5 and divorced a few years later, Harris wrote in her book.
Kamala Harris lived in California until she was in middle school, when she moved to Montreal after her mother was offered a teaching position at McGill University. Kamala Harris attended college at Howard University, an historically Black university, in Washington, D.C., and earned her law degree at the University of California, Hastings in 1989.
African ancestral connections
Several experts told us that the implication that Jamaicans aren’t African or connected to Africa is wrong on its face.
According to a 2011 census, 92.1% of Jamaicans are Black, with genetic studies showing that the vast majority are descendants of people from sub-Saharan Africa.
“Jamaica is a country where more than 90% of the population is of African ancestry,” Judith Byfield, a Cornell University professor who teaches Caribbean and African history, previously told PolitiFact. “So the idea that because her dad is Jamaican she has no African ancestry is completely false.”
Byfield said people scrutinizing Harris’ ethnic background often conflate several different categories.
“Jamaican is a national identity at the same time that it’s also a cultural identity and you can say the same for her Indian heritage,” she said. “Those are her parents, but she’s born here, and I think for first-generation people, there’s always a bit of tension between the extent that they are American, and by the extent they’ve been shaped and framed by their parents’ cultural affiliations.”
The African diaspora refers to the many communities of people of African descent dispersed throughout the world as a result of historic movements, both voluntary and involuntary.
During the more-than-400-years-long trans-Atlantic slave trade, an estimated 15 million African men, women and children were kidnapped from their homelands, forced into ships, and forced to endure a weekslong journey in crowded. filthy conditions before being sold into enslavement. The slave trade took millions of people to different regions throughout the Americas and the Caribbean.
In a 2020 op-ed, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie described how Jamaica was home to a brutal and violent plantation system and was a pivotal point in the slave trade.
“Many Jamaicans trace their origins directly to slavery and the mass importation of African captives,” Bouie wrote. “Based on a genealogical account by her father, there is a strong chance Kamala Harris is one of them. What’s more, many descendants of enslaved people in the Americas have European ancestry on account of the pervasive sexual violence whites perpetuated wherever slavery took root.”
Some anthropologists and ethnographers consider the African American identifier more broadly to encompass Black people who come from a wide range of countries, while others see it as being limited to Americans descended from people who were enslaved in America.
Grant said that claims that say Jamaican people are not African are unaware of slavery’s global reach.
“Slavery impacted many people from Africa, and we went to many places,” Grant said. “Harris’ father’s people got dropped off in Jamaica. Mine got dropped off in Haiti. The African diaspora is huge, and it is worldwide, so to suggest that a Jamaican is not African, or connected to Africa is not acknowledging the vestiges of slavery.”
Harris on being raised and living as a Black woman in America
Harris told The Washington Post in 2019 that she identifies simply as “an American,” and that she’s been comfortable with her identity from an early age, something she credits to her Hindu immigrant single mother, who adopted Black culture and immersed her daughters in it. Harris said that she grew up embracing her Indian culture while proudly living as a Black girl. She said the same in her book, “The Truths We Hold.”
She told the Post that she hasn’t spent much time dwelling on how to categorize herself, but being forced to define herself was more of a struggle when she first ran for office.
We have plenty of ways to categorize people, but racialized categorization has structural implications, Tracie Canada, a sociocultural anthropologist and an assistant professor of cultural anthropology and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University, previously told us when she taught at Notre Dame.
“Anti-Black racism, anti-Black violence, those are the things that actually matter,” Canada said. “Those are systemic problems and structural issues, so no matter how she identifies or how we identify her, is she going to be implicated in that systemic problem?”
Dianne Pinderhughes, a professor of Africana studies and political science at the University of Notre Dame, had told PolitiFact that the subject of racial identity is complex, especially for Harris, because she was immersed in Black culture and community since she was very young.
“You have a person who was socialized from her earliest years to be socially, culturally African American and also was supported and immersed in African American organizations,” Pinderhughes said. “I think the way race is played out in the United States, it’s just been the case for centuries, that people who have some color are usually assimilated in an African American community of some sort, and that community recognizes people who are willing to look in the mirror and recognize them as well.”
Another aspect of racial identity has a lot to do with where a person grew up or now lives. People’s local community tends to weigh heavily on how they identify themselves, experts said.
Byfield, who is of Jamaican descent and grew up in Queens, New York, said her life experience involved a blended community of Black individuals who came from countries all over the world. But they banded together in their identity and shared experiences. That may have been Harris’ experience, too.
“She has chosen to define herself in terms of the American landscape, and I think those of us who have had a multinational, cultural lifestyle, we’ve all had to figure out individually how to come to terms with it,” Byfield said. “You have all these different groups from different African countries, as well as Caribbean countries. African American community in the U.S. is not from one place, everyone is from everywhere.”
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