Kamala Harris’ race is her own business
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has tried to use identity politics to undermine his opponent, Kamala Harris. But while attempts to weaponise race are deplorable, identity is a very personal and often complicated equation
By Ben Jhoty
“WHAT’S YOUR BACKGROUND?” This is a question I get asked a lot. It’s nearly always an innocent enquiry, but it’s one that I’ve struggled to answer over the years. Often times I find myself replying, almost on rote: “My father is Mauritian and my mother is English but I was born in England and moved to Australia when I was four years old”.
The question takes on another dimension when I’m overseas. “Where are you from?” “Australia,” I reply, often to furrowed brows, prompting me to helpfully fill in the blanks for my curious acquaintance/dude on a train platform: “My father is from . . .”
The truth is, as someone of mixed race, I have often grappled with who I am and what the term ‘mixed race’ means. I grew up in a country town, where as one of the few dark-skinned kids, I was sometimes subject to racist slights – usually through the use of epithets to describe Black or Indigenous people. That ‘othered’ me, making me feel distinct, though, in my own conceited way, I reframed it as ‘special’.
At the same time, I didn’t often feel very Mauritian. I never spoke the language, Creole, at home; my mum did most of the cooking – a solid staple of meat and two veg; and I had no Mauritian friends or relatives. All my friends were white and culturally, at least, I had a quintessential Aussie country upbringing. When I have been to Mauritius at various times over the years, I have felt kinship with my relatives but no sense of pride or solidarity – and that is a shame. To my relatives, I am an Australian – if a rather conflicted one.
I was led to once again reflect on my identity, and the concept more broadly, after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s suggestion this week that his political opponent, Democrat presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, had suddenly “become Black”. Harris, he said, had previously always identified as Indian – Harris’ father was a Black Jamaican, while her mother, who raised her, was Indian.
“I’ve known her a long time – indirectly, not directly very much — and she was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. And now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black?”
She is both – Harris’ official White House profile describes her as the first Black American and the first South Asian American to be elected vice-president.
Of course, it’s not the first time Trump has sought to use race to undermine opponents by questioning their background – he helped give rise to the ‘birther’ movement by promoting conspiracy theories about former president Barack Obama’s nationality.
While it’s always difficult to speculate on Trump’s motives, sowing division is likely high on the agenda. At the same time, there may be some cold-blooded political cunning at play – perhaps he’s worried Harris has a stranglehold on the African-American vote and is seeking, rather desperately, to use questions around her identity to undermine her.
At this point, it’s probably worth mentioning that former president Barack Obama was also of mixed race. Born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, Obama also spent periods of his childhood in Indonesia. In the biography Barack Obama: The Story, by David Maraniss, acquaintances of Obama describe how upon moving to the US mainland, “he was called an ‘Oreo’ by other black students for his multicultural heritage. Later, while he was living in New York, Obama expressed feelings of uncertainty about his place in the world.
“Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me . . . the only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [of all the] classes; make them mine, me theirs,” he wrote.
He would, of course, go on to do that, becoming the nation’s first African-American President. He and many other prominent athletes and celebrities with varying degrees of mixed ethnicity, such as Tiger Woods, Lenny Kravitz, Zendaya, Naomi Osaka, Steph Curry, Keegan-Michael Key, J Cole, Mariah Carey and Dwayne Johnson, among others, either identify as Black or as people of colour. Not only is that how American society defines them, more importantly, it’s how they choose to be identified.
But while racial designations are often rigid, particularly in America, there will always be nuances and degrees of cultural affiliation that can sometimes lead to confusion, even alienation. In South Africa, where my wife is from, a distinction is drawn between mixed race (commonly called ‘coloured’) and being Black – one that is not drawn in the US. Yet if that same person were to come to America, as comedian Trevor Noah did, they would cease to be mixed race and for all intents and purposes be regarded as Black, even if that is not how they previously identified.
To make things even more complicated, in Noah’s case, he was regarded as white in South Africa by his Black relatives. Then he moved into a coloured neighbourhood, where as a first generation biracial man, he felt alienated from a community formed from a long history of racial intermixing. “Everyone looked like me, but we couldn’t have been more different … mixed but not coloured — coloured by complexion but not by culture”.
Similarly, within America’s African-American community, there are distinctions between light-skinned and dark-skinned people – those of mixed race generally being referred to as ‘light skinned’, as Kevin Durant playfully teased Steph Curry about at a NBA 2K promotional event back in 2014: “I thought he was white. He was this yellow kid, right? I’m just being real now, right? Where I come from, in the hood, we don’t see that. We don’t see the light-skinned guys around. It was all guys like me.”
For a long time, I lobbied (mostly in pubs with friends), for mixed race to be its own thing – something distinct from black or white or Indian or whatever. Given this is a cohort that’s only going to grow, I believed it made sense for mixed race people to be our own discreet group.
As I reflect now, though, perhaps that was more about me, after a lifetime of feeling confused and conflicted about my identity, wanting a group to whom I felt some sense of belonging. In that sense, I’ve welcomed the now widely accepted and broad church offered by the ‘people of colour’ designation that’s arisen in the last decade.
Even so, when the likes of Donald Trump attempt to make racial identity an issue, it does give me cause for concern. I find myself looking at my daughter, who despite both her parents having dark skin, has inherited many of my mother’s physical traits – she is light skinned, fair-haired and green-eyed – and wondering if she will have similar struggles to define herself, as I did. I hope that by the time she is old enough to understand and voice her feelings on these issues, society will be less defined by differences.
Ultimately though, it should be up to her to decide who she is and how she identifies, as it should be for all of us. It is not something for others to determine for us, certainly not political opponents and convicted felons.
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