News24 | ‘I was born black, I will die black’: Harris embraced her blackness long before politics

US Vice President and 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris delivers remarks before departing George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas, as she returns to Washington, DC. (Mark Felix/AFP)

• Donald Trump questioned Kamala Harris’ race.
• Harris was born of Jamaican and Indian parents.
• Harris has always embraced both her black and Indian heritage.

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Former president Donald Trump, who has a long history of making incendiary comments about race, has stepped up his attacks on his 2024 White House rival Kamala Harris by claiming she “happened to turn black” for political advantage.

But the reality is that the vice president, the product of a mixed-race marriage between Jamaican and Indian immigrants, embraced her blackness long before embarking on a career in public service.

Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964, to Afro-Jamaican Donald Harris, who came to the US to study economics, and Shyamala Gopalan, who emigrated from India at 19 to pursue her doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology.

They met at the University of California, Berkeley, a hub of student activism, while participating in the civil rights movement – and sometimes even taking a toddler Kamala along to marches.

Donald Harris remains a professor emeritus at Stanford University, while Gopalan, who helped advance breast cancer research, died in 2009.

READ |‘That is the American story’: Kamala Harris runs unopposed toward Democratic nomination

After the couple divorced, Gopalan raised Kamala and her younger sister Maya, instilling pride in their South Asian roots.

She took them on trips to India and often expressed affection or frustration in Tamil, Kamala wrote in her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold.

But Gopalan also understood 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 ensure we grew into confident, proud black women,” Harris wrote.

As a child, Harris was bused to a newly desegregated elementary school in a wealthier white neighbourhood and attended a black church on Sundays.

Harris told The Breakfast Club radio show in 2019:

But she’s continued to lean into her Indian heritage too, appearing in a 2019 video where she and actress Mindy Kaling, also of Indian descent, bonded over making dosas.

“She’s embraced her blackness and her Indian heritage as well,” said Kerry Haynie, chair of political science at Duke University, adding that Trump’s “race-baiting” attacks were aimed at galvanising his own base.

When it came time for 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 attended protests against apartheid in South Africa and joined the storied Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, founded to support black women.

Today, its 360 000 members include leading figures in politics, the arts, science and more.

Christopher Clark, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said:

After Howard, Harris enrolled at UC Hastings College of the Law, where she was elected president of the Black Law Students Association.

As she progressed through her career – elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003 and California’s attorney general in 2010 – she was consistently identified as black or African American in media reports.

Some went so far as to dub her the “female Obama” after Barack Obama, who was elected the nation’s first black president in 2008.

Their biographies have parallels: Both are biracial, with Obama’s father a Kenyan economist and his mother a white American.

Critics questioned the authenticity of his African American experience, and Trump may be using a similar tactic to try to discredit Harris, suggested Clark.

However, being black in America has always been a “very broad umbrella” due to the legacy of slavery, wrote Teresa Wiltz in a Politico op-ed, encompassing “myriad iterations of skin colour and hair texture and life experiences”.

The most important black political figures in US history have often been of mixed race, from abolitionist Frederick Douglass to activist-philosopher Angela Davis, Wiltz noted.

If Harris identifies as black, “we can – and should – take her word for it,” she said.