Speaking last week at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention, Donald Trump baselessly questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity.
“I didn’t know she was Black,” he claimed, “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?”
That’s ridiculous. Kamala Harris has always been Black. She has always been clear about her racial identity in a country that sees any person who is part-Black as Black. But of course, Donald Trump doesn’t get this because he’s never had to live his life looking through the lens of race.
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I have.
Kamala Harris and I were born in the same year, 1964, three years before the U.S. Supreme Court declared laws criminalizing interracial marriage unconstitutional. Yet some couples hadn’t waited. They defied the law, and the odds.
Kamala’s parents, a Jamaican man and an Indian woman, married for love in 1963. My parents–father also Black, mother white–did the same, in 1956. They and other such couples were exceedingly courageous. Most Americans were against interracial families, their children included.
The painful truth, then, was that they were also against kids like Kamala and me.
There were few of us back then. Born into families that were not legitimate in the eyes of law of society, we had to find our own sense of self in a country that defined its people in “black” and “white” terms. For me—an only child who knew no other “mixed nuts,” as were called—this was a painfully lonely process. (I was also called “Oreo,” “half-breed” and “half-n-----” at school, on the school bus, and on the playgrounds of my childhood.)
Donald Harris holding his daughter Kamala in April 1965.
ReutersSoon, however, we would call ourselves biracial and multiracial. We would define ourselves, rather than allow others to denigrate us.
For Kamala, as for me, this has clearly made her stronger: Her multi-hyphenate identity reflects that of this nation she seeks to lead, a nation founded by immigrants, a nation in which most Americans are multiethnic, if not multiracial. A nation in contrast to the white baby boomer homogeny to which Trump clings.
Kamala and I both graduated from public law schools in California in 1989. (Trump should know that I met Kamala thirty years ago at a meeting of the Charles Hamilton Houston Black Association–a group of socially-minded Black lawyers.) As members of a small community of Black women practicing law in the Bay Area, our mission was the same–to serve in the halls of justice, me as a public defender, she as an assistant district attorney.
Jim Floyd holds his daughter Jami on his shoulders in 1967.
Jo Ann FloydIn my own experience, the Bay Area was diverse—but not Black. I was very often the only Black lawyer in the room; at my law firm, then the largest in California, I could count the number of Black partners on one hand (three fingers). As a public defender, the client standing next to me in front of the bench was often Black, but the judge sitting behind it never was. I cannot speak for Kamala’s experience, but I do know that, when we were starting out, only five percent of California’s prosecutors were nonwhite.
Still, by 2003 she was running a competitive race for District Attorney of San Francisco; by 2004, she became the first woman to hold the post. And the first person of color, too. A multi-hyphenate in a city of multi-hyphenates.
Kamala Harris is not the first multiracial candidate to run for president, of course. In 2008, a tall Black man with a white mother defied expectations with his campaign of Hope and Change. Trump was afraid of Barack Obama too. Thus, the birther-lie began.
White men like Donald Trump fear this new and intersectional American identity so deeply because they lack the imagination to understand it. They fear it because they know that the number of people who checked more than one racial group on the 2020 census jumped by over 275% since the last. They fear it because they choose to cling to a fading mythology of “America” as a land founded by white men for white men.
But Kamala knows what any modern-thinking voter knows. We are a United States made stronger, as it always has been, by our multiculturalism. For the three decades I’ve known her, Kamala has known exactly who she is. She has gotten where she is not despite her identity, but because of it—and because of all of it.
Responding to Trump’s NABJ comments, she said that, “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strength.” Kamala’s greatest strength as a leader is to embrace American multiculturalism as the enduring tradition of who and what we are as a nation. This is her superpower.
And it’s Trump’s kryptonite.
Jami Floyd is a lawyer, ABC News legal analyst and the author of a forthcoming book about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and voting.
