To be very clear, being a person of color is not a choice. We do not decide to just be a race because it’s fitting, is opportunistic. Many of us, especially in America, are born into a country that has systematically marginalized its Black and brown people, and yet, now we are being accused of appropriating our own race.
The most recent remarks made by former President Donald Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago about Vice President Kamala Harris are so alarming because he was doing just that—accusing Harris of appropriating her Jamaican-Black heritage to better identify with her Black constituents.
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said. “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. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
“I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t,” Trump said. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person.”
As The Daily Beast reported, his attacks mirrored a 2019 GOP-led campaign that questioned whether Harris was an “American Black,” as her mother is Indian and her father is Jamaican. Then-candidate Joe Biden chastised the racist barbs, and Harris compared it to the birtherism attacks President Obama faced.
In response, Harris called Trump’s remarks “the same old show: the divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better. The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth. A leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us—they are an essential source of our strength.”
Though Trump’s rhetoric feels new, Trump’s history of attacking former President Obama’s ethnicity was cyclical—and is now aimed at Harris.
As a mixed-race person, I take Trump’s comments very seriously. There is a misconception that mixed-race minority people can choose which race they want to represent, but this is absolutely false. Regardless of what we look like, if we’re non-white, we are non-white—and America has decided this, not us.
I am biracial. My mother is Black, and my father is Jewish-white. I grew up in a rural town in New Jersey and was one of the only kids of color. Though I am half white, my Blackness is what people always saw first and is what affected my many challenges growing up in a place with little diversity.
While I’ve received my share of racial slurs, I never could decide to be white for a day—to find safety and privilege in a whiteness that I never experienced. My Black mother, as Black mothers often do, taught me that one drop of African ancestry equated to being Black because that was the history of America.
And this is what Trump does not seem to understand, America made it this way; America defined Black people as Black before being a people—which is why, again and again, Trump does not represent Black America, does not understand Black America, cannot connect with Black Americans. Questioning Harris’ Blackness is Trump’s way of discrediting her personage; questioning her Black identity is an act of dehumanization.
Trump’s attack aimed at Harris is racist. It’s not a tactic to just discredit her campaign. It’s not just Trump being Trump. It’s not just political jargon. These comments are atrocious and are very much the equivalent to “well-hidden” racial slurs used to describe mixed-race minority people, and I, for one, have grown so tired and so weary of this racist rhetoric.
U.S. Senator and vice president nominee, J.D. Vance, has some credibility in this conversation about race, a parent to mixed-race children, but his response to Trump’s comments were as expected—commending Trump’s bravery for going into hostile audiences and answering tough questions rather than acknowledging Trump’s perpetual insensitivity towards minorities. In congruent to Trump, Vance’s comments were as tone deaf, blaming the media for “overreacting.” Hence the problem with Trump and Vance’s leadership: an active opposition towards non-white America.
The point is, Trump wants to use Harris’s Blackness against her. However, what makes Harris such a dynamic force as a potential nominee in this presidential race, one that will arguably change the trajectory of America, is exactly that, is exactly this: Kamala Harris is Indian; Kamala Harris is a woman of color; Kamala Harris is and always will be a Black and brown woman in America.
The only difference today, from when she was a kid, from when I was a kid, is that her Blackness is power in a country that regarded Blackness as inferior, and Donald Trump, the nominee who wants nothing more than to divide us, is bloody terrified—afraid of what real unity in American could be.
If there is one thing that I’ve learned about being biracial, being half-Black, is that no one can ever take my Black identity away from me. My mother taught me this, in the same way I am sure Harris’ mother and father taught her. America has surely taken a lot from us: Black, Latino, Indigenous, East Asian and Asian, and Pacific Islander people, but America cannot steal the identities used to define us and now that we use to unite us.
The post Trump’s Racist Slur Was Aimed at Harris. It Hit All Biracial People, Too appeared first on The Daily Beast.
