The Willful Amnesia Behind Trump’s Attacks on Harris’s Identity
"Suggesting that there is something contrived about a mixed-race person identifying as Black assumes that the choice wasn’t already made for her.
When I was a child, my dad sat my older sister and me down in our living room and explained to us the rules of race in America. A Black man born into a Mississippi where Black boys could be lynched for merely standing too close to a white woman, he met my white mom in 1972. That was just a few years after the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia finally struck down 300 years’ worth of laws prohibiting people who descended from slavery from marrying people whose ancestors had enslaved them. In other words, Dad held no illusions about how race worked in our society and felt it was his duty as a parent to prepare us. Our mother might be white, he told us, but in this country, that fact was irrelevant to how we would be seen and treated. She might be white, but we were Black.
What my dad said that day when I was an elementary school student merely confirmed an understanding that I already had. I grew up surrounded by aunts, uncles, cousins and my grandmama from my dad’s side as just another child in a big Black family, my mom most often the only white person at family events. Several times a year, we’d travel about an hour out of town to rural Iowa, where we’d spend time with my white grandparents, who loved us dearly but who existed in a completely white world that we were never quite fully a part of.
I cannot say exactly how I knew I was Black before my dad sat us down, but I knew. Everyone knew. With my white family I was not white but part white. With my Black family and in the rest of America, I was Black. In American society, this race rule is so embedded that it is not even questioned.
Last week, former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, told a room full of Black journalists that Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother was Indian and whose father is Jamaican, “was always of Indian heritage” and “now wants to be known as Black.” When he did so, he was embracing a convenient historical amnesia about the country he seeks to lead.
By suggesting that there was something nefarious or politically contrived about a mixed-race person claiming Blackness as her identity, he was acting as if that choice hadn’t been made for Harris when she was born to a Black father. We saw this same orchestrated amnesia when Barack Obama set out to become the first Black president. It seems that when a mixed-race Black American appears to be ascending to the pinnacles of American power, some white Americans suddenly forget the race rules that white society created.
Trump’s questioning of Harris’s Black bona fides was swiftly denounced because Harris has long identified as Black, recounting a similar story to mine about her Indian mother explaining Harris’s Blackness to her as a child. In her 2019 autobiography, Harris wrote: “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” And of course, Harris would go on to graduate from one of the most prestigious historically Black universities where she had joined the nation’s oldest Black sorority.
But that is almost beside the point. The reality is, the belief that Blackness is an immutable, genetic racial category that transcends all other identities is in fact the American way — an idea that has been forced upon and enforced upon people with African ancestry by those who have racialized themselves as white since the 1600s.
It was then that European colonists, seeking to codify who could be enslaved and who would be free, began drafting systems of racial classification and the rules of race that still govern our society. These laws determined not only that people of African ancestry were inherently enslavable, but also that the children of European men and enslaved African women would also be enslaved. Their “whiteness” would not be recognized, and they would be entitled to none of the rights the white colonists were crafting for themselves.
We are taught to think of race as being our physical characteristics or our ancestral connection to a certain geography, but European colonists were inventing race rules that were about more than ancestry. They were a means of divvying up power, resources and social status. Under these rules, a person whose ancestors were mostly European — and who looked European — was categorized as Black and could be enslaved and denied rights merely because he or she had a single known or suspected African ancestor. To cement this racial order, colonists passed laws prohibiting marriage between people that the colonial legal and social systems had categorized as Black and those they had categorized as white. Whiteness, rather than being a genetic reality as many people still believe, was and is a social construct.
With the abolition of slavery in 1865, white Americans were determined to maintain the architecture of white supremacy and the exclusive white rights it entailed, even as the pervasive rape and sexual coercion of enslaved Black women had produced large numbers of Black Americans with European ancestry. So as white Americans passed apartheid laws to keep millions of newly freed Black people from political, social and economic equality, they also had to pass laws to determine who would be considered white and could therefore enjoy the spoils of the constructed racial hierarchy.
When Harris’s parents immigrated here in the early 1960s, they entered a pre-existing racial caste system and the classifications that undergirded it. When the couple fell in love, so-called antimiscegenation laws prohibiting Black people from marrying white people still existed in 16 states. Those laws were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the Loving v. Virginia decision, which struck down the state’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act. That law had banned interracial marriage, set out rigid and strict racial classifications, and criminalized people whom the state considered to be falsely claiming to be white on official documents in order to access white schools or to marry someone white.
The head of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics was a eugenicist named Walter Ashby Plecker, who believed that maintaining white supremacy depended upon maintaining white racial purity. He was pivotal in drafting the act, which defined a white person as someone “with no trace of the blood of another race.” It enshrined into Virginia law the belief that African ancestry was so tainted that it would overpower any other ancestry. The premise of the so-called “one-drop rule” is that any person who has even a drop of Black blood is Black. Under this law, despite Harris’s being of both Jamaican and Indian heritage, she would have legally been considered Black.
Despite the overturning of the Racial Integrity Act almost 60 years ago, most Americans, no matter their race, still believe in racial notions dictating that having a Black parent makes you Black.
When Trump chose the National Association of Black Journalists convention to argue that this racially mixed Black woman was not in fact Black, he did so in front of an audience of journalists whose complexions reflect every shade of brown. The sexual legacy of slavery means that Black Americans by definition are a racially mixed people who have never had the luxury of demanding racial purity.
The irony of the moment was sharp: the head of a party that has justified a four-year campaign seeking to attack and ban books and school curricula about Black people and this nation’s history of racism by arguing that Democrats are obsessed with racial identity was now attacking Harris for her racial identity.
Or that even as Trump was denying Harris’s Blackness, his surrogates had spent the weeks since she became the presumed Democratic presidential nominee engaging in racist anti-Black tropes of Harris as an incompetent, lazy, “low IQ” diversity hire who, in the tradition of the Black Jezebel, had slept her way to the top.
In doing so, Trump and some in the Republican Party are engaging in an age-old American tradition that dictates that only white power gets to define race and racial categorization, and that those who wield that power can create rules or abandon them so long as those rules benefit whiteness.
For Trump and his compatriots, race is the wild card that can be held in their hand, to be denied for political expediency or exploited when it suits them. Six years ago, Trump relentlessly mocked Elizabeth Warren, then a presidential candidate, for having claimed Native American heritage, leading her to take a DNA test to prove her ancestry.
And last week, Trump once again attempted to be the arbiter of racial categorization. When he questioned Harris’s racial identity under the belief that it might somehow persuade a room full of Black journalists, and therefore Black America writ large, that she is not like us, he showed that he respects neither the history of this country nor the Black voters he claims he is courting.
When Obama insisted he was a biracial Black man, when Harris insists she is a biracial Black woman, when I do the same, it is an assertion that powerful white people do not get to define the rules of race anymore, to force identities and categories upon us, or to withdraw them, when it suits them.
Whether or not Harris accepted her Black identity, she lives in a country where four centuries of race law predetermined how the nation would see her and treat her. Her Black identity, like mine, is based in both a pragmatism about how our society works and a conscious decision to proudly and lovingly choose an identity that has been so denigrated and maligned. Black Americans did not have a say in this system of racial classification. This nationalized one-drop rule was thrust upon Black people, this is true, but it is in embracing this expansive view of Blackness that Black Americans have found their power."
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