Former President Donald Trump, who has a long history of making inflammatory remarks about race, has stepped up his attacks on his 2024 White House rival Kamala Harris, claiming she “accidentally happened to be Black” for political gain.
But the reality is that the vice president, the product of a mixed-race marriage between Jamaican and Indian immigrants, embraced his black faith long before he began his career in public service.
‘I am proud to be black’
Harris was born in Oakland, California in 1964 to an African-Jamaican father, Donald Harris, who came to the US to study economics. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, came to the US from India at the age of 19 to pursue a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology.
They met at the University of California, Berkeley, a hotbed of student activism, when they were participating in the civil rights movement — and sometimes took a little girl, Kamala, with them to marches.
Donald Harris remains professor emeritus at Stanford University, while Gopalan, who helped pioneer breast cancer research, died in 2009.
After the divorce, Gopalan raised Kamala and her younger sister Maya, instilling in them pride in their South Asian roots. Kamala wrote in her 2019 book “The Truths We Hold” that he took them on trips to India and often expressed his love or frustration in Tamil.
But Gopalan also understood that she was raising two black daughters.
“She knew her homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we grew up to be confident, proud Black women,” Harris wrote.
As a child, Harris was bused to a newly segregated elementary school in a wealthy white neighborhood, and on Sundays she attended a black church.
“I am black and I am proud to be black. I was born black and I will die black,” Harris said on The Breakfast Club radio show in 2019.
But she has also continued to hold on to her Indian heritage, with a 2019 video showing her and Indian-born actress Mindy Kaling making dosa while sharing a photo.
“He has also embraced his Blackness and Indian heritage,” said Kerry Haynie, chair of political science at Duke University, adding that Trump’s “racist” attacks were aimed at galvanizing his own base.
Howard University and the ‘Female Obama’
When it came time to attend college, Harris chose Howard University, a historically black institution in the US capital, following in the footsteps of her hero Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice on the US Supreme Court.
She joined protests against apartheid in South Africa and joined the renowned Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, which was founded to support black women. Today, its 360,000 members include leading figures in politics, the arts, science and other fields.
“This is a powerful signal of alignment with black Americans,” said Christopher Clark, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
After Howard, Harris attended UC Hastings College of the Law, where she was elected president of the Black Law Students Association.
As she progressed in her career — elected San Francisco’s district attorney in 2003 and becoming California’s attorney general in 2010 — she was consistently identified in media reports as black or African American.
Some even called her the “female Obama,” after Barack Obama, who was elected the country’s first black president in 2008.
There are similarities in their biographies: Both are biracial, with Obama’s father being a Kenyan economist and his mother being white American.
Clark suggested that critics have questioned the authenticity of her African American experience, and that Trump may be using similar tactics to discredit Harris.
However, Teresa Wiltz wrote in an editorial for Politico that because of the legacy of slavery, being black in America has always been a “much broader umbrella” that includes “myriad iterations of skin color and hair texture and life experiences.”
Wiltz said the most important black political figures in U.S. history have often been of mixed race, from slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass to activist-philosopher Angela Davis.
He said that if Harris identifies herself as Black, “we can and should believe her.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
