Kamala Harris is Black. Kamala Harris is Asian American. We hold these truths to be self-evident, to the degree that even engaging with Donald Trump’s profoundly absurd claim that the vice president decided to “turn Black”—as if on a whim, for political points—feels like an exercise in futility.
But Donald Trump is running for president, and when he appeared on July 31 to speak at a panel held by the National Association of Black Journalists and suggested that Harris “happened to turn Black” a number of years ago, he was not doing so in a vacuum.
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” the former president said, on the record, in front of people. “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
“I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went—she became a Black person,” he continued, because no one on his campaign was there to clap a hand over his mouth. “I think somebody should look into that too.”
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If I’ve learned anything from Trump’s ascent from reality TV star to president of the United States, it’s that his warped narratives are rooted in American oblivion that is stronger and more potent than we probably care to admit. If this guy can’t wrap his head around the idea of a single person being two (or more!) races, chances are he’s not the only one.
So it’s with a heavy sigh that I say, not for the first time in my life, that…drum roll, please…biracial people exist! And we come in all different shapes, sizes, colors, and combos. We are nightmare fuel for the conservative men crying “DEI hire!” wherever we go. But we are here!
For many of us biracial folks, our experience is rich—filled with joy and culture and love. But also, to be frank, sometimes it’s just annoying as hell. First there’s the never-ending barrage of “what are you?”’s and/or disbelief that you are who you say you are. “You don’t look Japanese,” is a response I received a lot as a kid when asked to explain my tanned skin and thick curly hair. This comment was often followed by a list of other ethnicities which I might more easily pass for: Fillippina. Mexican. Pacific Islander. At some point, it just became easier for me to shrug my shoulders and show people a photo of my petite Japanese American mom.
It is particularly infuriating to be a biracial person who doesn’t necessarily “pass” as either of the races which make up their genetic code. If you are not phenotypically presenting as one race or the other, your experiences and your identity are often doubted, or explained away with qualifiers. (“Oh, but she’s only half.“) And to an extent, it’s true that biracial people’s lives will not always look similar to that of a person who passes as a member of a single race. For example, my mom will never understand what it was like when a white friend’s white dad made snide, racially charged comments about my family, assuming we were Mexican. And I will never understand what it was like to be a Japanese American in postwar Southern California, a child whose family was rebuilding after internment. Does that make either of us less Asian American? No. That just means that in 2024, the Asian American experience looks different than it did in John Hughes’s 1980s, which was apparently the decade in which Donald Trump formed all of his opinions about what a person can and cannot be.
Trump doesn’t understand what it means to exist outside of the archetype he inherited—the rich, white, New York businessman—and the archetypes that made up pop culture when he was coming of age; he simply cannot fathom what exists outside of what was popular decades ago. He lacks the imagination to see a world in which a leader looks different than all those who came before her. It’s the same mental block which prohibits him from understanding gender identity and the mere existence of trans people. He is the “okay, grandpa” meme, but if we gave that grandpa back the keys to the country.
Harris does not need to explain her Blackness, in the same way that Trump does not need to explain whatever part of his ethnic background is responsible for his orange complexion and straw-colored comb over. She does not owe anyone an excuse for being light-skinned, or for passing as ethnically ambiguous; she may have certain privileges as a result of having these features (an essay for another day), but no one is allowed to gatekeep her claim to her racial identity—least of all Donald Trump.
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Some mixed people identify as just that—”mixed.” My mom always called me and my brother “hapa,” a common term which originated in Hawaii and roughly translates to “half.” Over the years, “Wasian” has become increasingly popular, along with its counterpart, “Blasian.” But I am still an Asian American. And when I began speaking up about the wave of anti-Asian hate crimes during Covid, I was not “suddenly Asian.” Just like Kamala Harris did not “turn Black” because it was politically advantageous to do so, an appeal to a slice of voters and not the true fact of her life.
By 2044, America will become a majority-minority country, with the number of non-Hispanic white people dropping below 50 percent of the country’s racial makeup. And many of these minority people will be mixed. As the country becomes more and more diverse, mixed kids will face new challenges outside of the right to proclaim their identity. We will eventually rise to the occasion and build greater empathy for their experiences, but unfortunately, it will happen slowly.
I’m 31 years old, and I still remember raising my hand in class to ask my teacher which “race” box to check when filling out my Scantron for California’s standardized tests, years before “Two or more races” became my silly little default box. My parents—a white man and a Japanese American woman—are both older than the groundbreaking Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia, which secured the right to interracial marriage for all Americans. The point is America moves slowly. But we can’t wait for 78-year-old Donald Trump to play catch up with the changing demographics of the United States. We don’t have enough time for that, and frankly, neither does he.
Sam Reed is the senior entertainment editor at Glamour.
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