Trump’s Comments About Kamala Harris’ Race Are All Too Familiar For Biracial People

When clinical psychologist Jennifer Noble watched former President Donald Trump question Vice President Kamala Harris’ ethnic background earlier this week, she was “annoyed, to say the least.”
Noble, who specializes in helping parents of mixed-race children in her practice and is Black and Sri Lankan herself, was certain Trump was making a political calculation when he said Harris had only “promoted” her Indian heritage and just “happened to turn Black” for political convenience.
“It was a National Association of Black Journalists conference, so I think he thought he might endear himself more to the audience,” Noble said. “By saying she only ‘happened to turn Black’ recently, he was hoping the audience would also want to deny her the connection to Blackness.”
Harris has never denied her mixed racial heritage; the politician is the daughter of two immigrants, a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, as well as a graduate of Howard University, a historically Black college.
Trump’s assertion about Harris’ non-Blackness was met with what Reuters described as a “smattering of jeers” from the audience of roughly 1,000 people.
“Obviously he had not done his homework,” Noble told HuffPost. “However, he is an exaggerated example of what is going on for so many. I have seen social media comments, news media outlets and my own social circle refer to the VP as Black or Indian. Rarely is she referred to as both or and.”
By openly questioning the vice president’s ethnic background, Trump perpetuated a common expectation mixed-race people face: You can’t be both.
“I have absolutely been asked ― or told ― to pick a side,” Noble said. “I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had where after I disclose my Sri Lankan and African American backgrounds, the response is, ’oh, OK, but you know you’re Black, right? That’s it ― ‘you’re Black.’ It’s like my Sri Lankan heritage is erased or denied.”
In the U.S., the historical legacy of the ‘one-drop rule’ meant people with even one Black ancestor have long been categorized as Black. Today, many mixed-race people are judged for not being “enough” of one ethnicity or another, sometimes within those same ethnic communities.
Despite a growing number of Americans who identify as more than one race — the multiracial population in the United States increased by 276% from 2010 to 2020, growing from 9 million to 33.8 million people, or 10.2% of the total population ― we still don’t know how to talk about multiracial experiences.
Mixed-race people who do acknowledge both of their races are sometimes labeled as confused or lost as to who they are, Noble said. (This belief echoes the “tragic mulatto” archetype ― the idea that a mixed race person is naturally depressed or even suicidal because they fail to fall into one category.)
Sometimes, mixed-race people are viewed as deceitful and conniving if they identify as more than one thing, Noble said. “They’re trying to ‘use’ their multiple backgrounds only when it benefits them somehow, as we see in the Harris case.”
One 2018 Rutgers University study found that white people consider biracial people to be less trustworthy if they change their racial presentation in different circumstances.
This delegitimizing of multiracial identities flattens mixed-race people’s lived experiences and may make them feel it’s “unsafe to connect and find belonging [in] their cultural groups,” Noble said.
Trump’s own vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, has biracial children. The junior Ohio senator is white while his wife, Usha, is of Indian descent. Still, Vance has defended his running mate’s divisive comments, saying Trump had zeroed in on Harris’ “fundamental chameleon-like nature.”
These kinds of characterizations can lead to negative mental health outcomes for mixed-race people, according to Sarah E. Gaither, an associate professor in the department of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University.
“Identity denial ― telling someone they are not Black when they actually are, for instance ― is one of the most common stressors that multiracial Americans report experiencing,” Gaither told HuffPost.
One 2019 study published in the Journal of Psychological Issues found that biracial Americans’ cortisol levels returned to baseline more slowly when a researcher denied one of their identities.
As a biracial Black and white person who’s more often perceived as white, Gaither has had her fair share of experiences of people denying her Black heritage. Growing up, some even questioned whether her father was really related to her, given their differing skin tones.
“I will always remember walking around the mall as a child and having someone come up to us and ask me if I knew the man holding my hand — [who,] of course, was my father — since they assumed he was kidnapping me,” she said.
Gaither said it’s encounters like those that remind her of how fixed our country’s ideas are about race.
“The thing is, race is socially constructed which means we have the opportunity to reshape what race means and what racial groups and identities are accepted,” she said.
In the 2010s, Trump helped to spread the “birther” conspiracy theory, which suggested falsely that former President Barack Obama hadn’t really been born in the U.S. Now, others in Trump’s camp are parroting his fictions about Harris.
At a Pennsylvania rally Wednesday, Alina Habba, Trump’s onetime attorney and current campaign booster, also portrayed Harris as a racial obfuscator.
“I’m going to speak to you, Ms. Harris,” she told the audience. “I’m a strong woman, a mom, a lawyer and an American. And unlike you, Kamala, I know who my roots are, I know where I come from and I don’t play around with the Constitution.”
Analía Albuja, a psychology professor at Northeastern University who studies multiracial identities, is worried about the implication of Trump’s “turn Black” comments.
Recent history shows that Trump’s stump speech messaging carries weight; Albuja, who’s bicultural herself, pointed to a 2018 study that found that prejudice towards the groups that Trump targeted in the 2016 race ― immigrants and Muslims specifically ― was seen as more acceptable after the election, but not prejudice towards groups that he didn’t target.
“This makes me concerned that if these types of denials and questioning of Harris’ identity continue, questioning mixed-race people’s identity will be seen as something that is more acceptable to do,” Albuja told HuffPost.
“I hope instead this [election] can give people exposure to a mixed-race person and help normalize identifying with multiple groups,” she said.
The Trump campaign is projecting this on the screen above the stage at his rally in Harrisburg PA: pic.twitter.com/ZsGHAZaruk
Ayumi Matsuda-Rivero, a PhD candidate at the University of California San Diego, also isn’t surprised that Harris’ biracial identity has become a talking point now that the race is tightening up.
“I knew it would happen as soon as [she] was announced as the Democratic candidate, I just didn’t think I expected the comments to be so absurd,” she said.
In her own experience as a Venezuelan-Japanese American, Matsuda-Rivero said she hasn’t been asked to “pick” a side because other people usually assign her one themselves.
“For example, I went to a predominantly white high school. When I was in high school, a white classmate of mine would say that I was being ‘Hispanic’ if I was struggling in class. But if I was doing well or getting good grades, then it was because I was Asian,” she told HuffPost.
For many years, Matsuda-Rivero tried to explain her mixed-race identity to people who struggled with it, but she says that’s exhausting. She doesn’t want to have to explain where her parents are from because that inevitably leads to questions about how they met, which then leads to questions about why they were in the U.S. and why she’s in the U.S. now.
“Sometimes that’s been the only way for people to ‘get it,’ but that requires a willingness on my end to disclose my personal history to people who I may barely know, and that should not be expected of me,” she said.
Ultimately, Matsuda-Rivero said, mixed-race people don’t owe an explanation to others for their identity.
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“To borrow from Maria P. P. Root’s ‘Bill of Rights for People of Mixed Heritage,’ we have the right to not be responsible for other people’s discomfort with our physical, ethnic, or racial ambiguity,” Matsuda-Rivero said.
“We have the right to express our mixed-race identity however we like because there is no ‘right way’ to be mixed-race,” she added.
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