The Willful Amnesia Behind Trump’s Attacks on Kamala Harris’s Identity

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.