WASHINGTON: Former President Donald Trump, who has a long history of running on race, has stepped up his attack on his 2024 White House rival Kamala Harris, saying she “turned black”. he for political advantage.
But the fact is that the Vice President, as a result of intermarriage between Jamaican and Indian immigrants, adopted Blacks long before he was arrested for public service.
Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964, to Afro-Jamaican Donald Harris, who came to the United States to study economics, and Shyamala Gopalan, who immigrated from India at age 19 to pursue her graduate degree. nutrition and endocrinology.
They met at the University of California, Berkeley, a hotbed of student activism, while participating in civil rights movements — and sometimes even taking toddler Kamala on marches. .
Donald Harris remains a professor emeritus at Stanford University, while Gopalan, who helped advance breast cancer research, died in 2009.
After the divorce, Gopalan adopted his younger sisters Kamala and Maya, increasing their pride in South Asia. He took them on trips to India and often expressed love or frustration in Tamil, Kamala wrote in her 2019 book, “The Truths We Hold.”
But Gopalan also understood that he was raising two black daughters.
“He knew his country would see Maya and I as black girls, and he was determined to make sure we grew up to be confident and proud black women,” Harris wrote.
As a child, Harris was taken to an elementary school in an affluent white neighborhood and attended a black church on Sundays.
“I'm black, and I'm proud to be black, and I was born black, I'm going to die black,” Harris told The Breakfast Club radio show in 2019.
But he also continued to lean towards his Indian heritage, appearing in a 2019 video where he paired up with actress Mindy Kaling, also of Indian origin, making dosas.
“He took on Black people and their Indian heritage, too,” said Kerry Haynie, chair of political science at Duke University, adding that Trump's attacks were aimed at strengthening his own base.
When it came time for college, Harris chose Howard University, a black institution in the US capital, following in the footsteps of his hero Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice of the US Supreme Court.
She participated in anti-apartheid protests in South Africa and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, founded to support black women. Today, its 360,000 members include prominent figures in politics, art, science and more.
“It's a powerful indicator of alignment among black Americans,” said Christopher Clark, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
After Howard, Harris enrolled at UC Hastings College of the Law, where he was elected president of the Black Law Student Association.
As he advanced in his career – elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003 and California attorney general in 2010 – he was consistently identified as black or African American in media reports.
Some have gone so far as to call her “Obama Girl” after Barack Obama, who was elected the country's first black president in 2008.
Their biographies share similarities: both are biracial, with Obama's father a Kenyan economist and his mother a white American.
Critics have questioned the authenticity of her African-American experience, and Trump may use similar tactics to try to discredit Harris, Clark said.
However, being Black in America has always been a “large umbrella” because of the legacy of slavery, writes Teresa Wiltz in a Politico op-ed, which includes “the reclamation of skin color and hair hair and life experiences.”
The most prominent black political figures in US history have often been of mixed race, from abolitionist Frederick Douglass to activist philosopher Angela Davis, Wiltz notes.
If Harris claims to be Black, “we can — and should — take him at his word for it,” he said.
