When Donald Trump addressed a room full of Black journalists, he swiftly attacked the identity of his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, as a Black woman, suggesting that she had ‘only recently’ become Black. “She was Indian all the way and then... she made a turn and... became a Black person,” he said derisively.
Harris responded by describing Trump’s remarks as “the same old show” of divisiveness and disrespect. And maybe it’s because she felt no need to defend the plainly obvious fact that she is and has always been a Black woman as much as an Indian woman that she did not draw attention to her background. Trump’s attacks on her identity were predictable and the Harris campaign has preferred to centre its messaging on drawing attention to the ‘weirdness’ of the Trump campaign, her history as a prosecutor, and Trump’s status as a felon. Although she need not centre her campaign on her identity, by sidelining her backstory out of fear that her family’s non-white, immigrant background could fan Trump’s flames against her, Harris risks missing a crucial opportunity not only for her campaign but for American politics at large.
Trump’s comments reminded me of the Elizabeth Warren scandal during the 2016 presidential campaign in which he accused her of inflating her native American heritage to gain advancement in her career as a law professor at Harvard. The scandal led to Trump nicknaming her “Pocahontas” and Warren committing one of the biggest gaffes in recent political memory by attempting to prove her identity with a DNA test. The casting of Warren as a fraud, and her desperate response to correct the impression, doomed her campaign. Harris is likely to be eager to not replicate those results by indulging Trump’s attacks.
Perhaps as a result, Harris’s stump speeches “tend to speed past personal mythology,” as was noted in a New Yorker profile. In her brief mentions of her family, she talks about the lessons she learnt from her Chennai-born mother, Shyamala Gopalan. “My mother instilled in my sister, Maya, and me the values that would chart the course of our lives,” she said while on the 2020 presidential campaign trail. “She raised us to be proud, strong Black women. And she raised us to know and be proud of our Indian heritage.”
Gopalan and Donald Harris, a Jamaican Marxist economist and an eventual professor at Stanford, met when they both moved to the United States of America for their graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The two young immigrants of colour became part of a Black intellectual study group that held talks about the experiences of Africans and African-Americans. Their friendship grew while in the group. Gopalan’s father was a life-long civil servant and supported her goal to pursue cancer research and her education abroad. She was just 19 when she earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Delhi and eventually earned a PhD from UC Berkeley in nutrition and endocrinology at 25 and worked as a breast cancer researcher. Harris and Gopalan married in 1963. Kamala Harris was born a year later in 1964 amid the American civil rights movement. They were married while US anti-miscegenation laws were in place: they were allowed to marry because at that time American-Indians were classified as “Other” although by 1970, after the anti-miscegenation laws had been deemed unconstitutional in 1967, Indian-Americans were officially deemed White. After 1972, the marriage fell apart and Kamala Harris was largely raised by her mother.
Harris is far from a perfect candidate, and her personal history can hardly cancel her shortcomings. In her 2020 campaign, she courted much of the Democratic Party’s activist contingent by praising such issues as police reform, decriminalising undocumented entry to the US, and backing the Green New Deal. However, the activists she courted mostly rejected her, citing her background as a prosecutor known for being too tough, particularly on Black men and drug crimes. This provides openings for Trump’s campaign in key, if not entirely consistent, ways in that he can label her both a ‘radical leftist’, thus alienating potential centrist voters, while also highlighting some of her features that could undermine support from more leftist voters in the Democratic base.
But attacks over whether or not she is Black, or rather she cannot be Black because she is Indian, sound ridiculous. Trump thought that by painting Harris as some sort of Black poser, he might be able to speak to some Black voters. Not only does this make him ignorant of the fact of biracial identity in America, with which more than 10% of Americans identify, but Harris’s parents’ involvement in fighting for African-American liberty during the civil rights movement is also a good reminder of the otherwise obvious fact that yes, Harris is Black and has always identified as such. This is all the more reason for her to not be afraid to talk about her background.
Although he was elected president, I do not believe that Americans are so fundamentally hateful, racist and misogynist as Trump. And although he won against Hillary Clinton, the “most experienced” and “most qualified” presidential candidate in history, to cite the former president, Barack Obama, Clinton represented a bipartisan status quo of American politics that had long favoured corporations and elite donors over workers, a disastrous war maintained half a world away, and the continuation of one of the most entrenched and unpopular dynastic political families in modern American politics. It is not hard to believe that people wanted something else, even if it came in such a vulgar package as Trump.
There is little use in denying that this presidential election is about emotional narratives. J.D. Vance, who was chosen immediately after the assassination attempt against Trump, was picked for being someone who understands how to spin an emotional story. His memoir became so ubiquitous that it inspired a Netflix adaptation even across the Atlantic (it apparently even brought the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, to tears). Hoping to capitalise on an image of Trump not being a vicious reactionary but rather a hero, a savior, brave in the face of death, Vance was meant to help spin the narrative in this direction. Unfortunately for Vance, his bizarre views have branded the Trump campaign ‘weird’ and his association with it seems to be more of a hindrance than a help to Trump.
But Harris’s entrance into the presidential race has brought a desperately-needed emotion back into American politics: hope. At its most inspiring, America is a nation of hope. Obama ran, and won twice, on hope. Harris’s backstory says so much about the best of modern America. Both her parents came to the US as immigrants dreaming of building a more equal, more just, world. I do not believe Harris’s background will hurt her. It may alienate some, but they were likely lost voters anyway.
There are few feelings as powerful in this world as hope. It guides our paths in our darkest hours. This is Harris’s greatest asset. And maybe we, too, can hope.
Carol Schaeffer is a journalist based in Berlin, Germany, and is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington D.C
