If there is a depth to which U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump cannot sink when attacking his opponents, we are yet to see it. His latest salvo came at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in July, when he asked of Vice President Kamala Harris, “Is she Indian or is she Black?” The gasps, reportedly, were audible.
If there is a depth to which U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump cannot sink when attacking his opponents, we are yet to see it. His latest salvo came at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in July, when he asked of Vice President Kamala Harris, “Is she Indian or is she Black?” The gasps, reportedly, were audible.
His question was meant to undermine her authenticity, of course, and it deserved the opprobrium it received. But it also proved that even with President Joe Biden out of the running, age is still an issue in the upcoming election. Trump’s politics of categorization belongs to a time that younger Americans have never known, when the demographic landscape of the United States couldn’t have been more different.
Consider that Trump was born in 1946, two decades before the nationwide lifting of anti-miscegenation laws, which prohibited interracial marriage. In his formative years, Black Americans were living under Jim Crow policies. For the first half of the 20th century, immigration from Asia had been kept to a bare minimum, first under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and then the Immigration Act of 1924, both passed with an eye to maintaining the United States’ whiteness.
Trump was the product of a time in which people really were expected to occupy fixed racial boxes, kept discrete by law, “when the walls of race were clear and straight,” as sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois put it. An American could be legally Black by virtue of a single Black great-grandparent. Never multiracial or racially ambiguous, as they might be in most other countries—only Black. So, when Trump demands of Harris that she be one or the other, Indian or Black (assuming that his question is sincere), perhaps it is beyond his imagination that anyone might be both.
Harris, on the other hand, reflects the United States as it is now: a tapestry of racial and ethnic diversity in which few can pretend that they are easily defined. She was born in 1964, a few months after the Civil Rights Act was passed. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 would enable a substantial increase in Asian immigration in that same decade.
When Harris was a teenager, those of South Asian heritage living in the United States still numbered fewer than half a million. They were practically invisible to most other Americans. There was such uncertainty about their racial identity that in one national opinion poll conducted by the National Opinion Research Center in 1978, 15 percent of respondents believed that Indians were Black, and another 11 percent saw them as white. Today, though, Indians are the second-largest immigrant group in the United States, after Mexicans and just before Chinese. They have their own demographic checkbox in the census.
Far more significantly, Americans are less likely than ever to identify with a single race or ethnicity. In 2000, in response to demands to accommodate those of mixed heritage, the U.S. Census Bureau gave people the option to tick more than one racial box for the first time. That year, almost 7 million Americans reported belonging to more than one race (interestingly, 823 of these respondents claimed six races). A decade later, that number had gone up by almost a third.
In the most recent census, conducted in 2020, partly because of improvements to how data was collected, that number went up again—this time by 276 percent. Unsurprisingly, younger Americans are the most likely to report being multiracial.
So, with his obsession over categorization, Trump couldn’t sound more out of date. He is trying to force people into the kinds of boxes that defined lives when he was a child. He is telling Americans that there is only one way to be white, or Black, or Indian, when they already know this isn’t true. It is a politics that dares to put others in their place, yes, but also fails to see them as they are.
Coincidentally, his ill-judged remarks about Harris happened to come just days before the centenary of the birth of one of the United States’ most brilliant social critics, James Baldwin, who himself gloriously embodied the contradictions of identity. In his 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel”—as fresh now as the day it was written, in sharp contrast to Trump’s desperately tired ideas about race—Baldwin cautioned against succumbing to the fallacy that it is “categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”
It is perfectly possible to live within and between cultures and maintain an authentic sense of self. it is not just Harris who proves this, but the millions of Americans who have enriched the nation by mixing, marrying, and building a more integrated society. They have changed the country for the better.
When Trump casts aspersions on Harris’s racial background, he does the same to countless others. He questions the pluralistic society that the United States has become—one in which race has already come to matter less than it used to.
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