When Barack Obama first ran for president, he faced what his advisers would refer to as the “black enough” question.
Pundits repeatedly asked whether the facts that his father was Kenyan and from a Muslim background, his mother white, and he’d been raised partly in Indonesia would hamper his appeal to African American voters.
A headline in the San Francisco Chronicle in February 2007, the month Obama announced his candidacy, asked: “Is he African American if his roots don’t include slavery?”
Then, there was an assumption from many commentators that black voters would stick with Hillary Clinton because of the popularity of her husband former President Bill Clinton. Now, some are arguing that African American voters will favor Joe Biden, rather than a black candidate like Kamala Harris, because he was Obama’s vice president.
In 2008, however, Obama crushed Clinton among black voters, flocking to him after he won the caucuses in predominantly-white Iowa. He won South Carolina, where the Democratic primary is more than 60% black, by a 28-point margin.
Defending him was Harris, then San Francisco’s district attorney and an early Obama supporter when Clinton was the overwhelming favorite for the 2008 Democratic nomination.
“The conversation highlights the lack of information that people in general have about African American contributions,” Harris was quoted as saying in the article. “That is the added significance of Barack Obama. He is opening up what has been a limited perspective of who is an African American.”
In another article, Harris, now 54, said: “A lot of us tend to oversimplify political labels. He’s much more interesting and complex than those normal categories.”
The opinion of Harris was sought in part because her background was also unusual and not part of America’s slavery experience. The daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, who took the lead in raising her after her parents separated when she was seven, and who spent some of her childhood in Canada meant she too couldn’t be easily defined.
She was born in Oakland, a city with a rich history of black activism, and spent her early childhood in Berkeley, California, where she worshiped at a Hindu temple in addition to attending black Baptist services. She attended high school in Montréal before returning to the United States to go to Howard University, a historically black college.
As with Obama, there is a class element to the critique: Obama attended an elite high school in Hawaii, and the parents of Harris were relatively wealthy immigrants.
A dozen years after Obama’s historic primary battle, Harris is now surging in the polls after taking on early front-runner Joe Biden in last week’s opening 2020 primary debates, confronting him over his opposition in the 1970s to busing, the policy of forcing an end to educational segregation by transporting children to mixed schools.
The Democratic senator for California described how she had been bused in Berkeley, California, at age six. A powerful benefit for Harris of the debate exchange is that it fused her personal experience with that of a searing chapter in African American history — busing — in a way that Obama, for instance, had been unable to do.
But the former California state attorney general’s background has triggered conspiracy theories similar to those Obama faced.
First son Donald Trump Jr. drew ire for retweeting black conservative provocateur Ali Alexander stating: “Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican.”
Trump Jr. shared this with his 3.65 million followers. Harris campaign communications director Lily Adams compared the tweet, which appears to have been spread by bots online, some of whom falsely stated she was born in Canada, to “birtherism,” the conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya.
Right-wing operative Jacob Wohl inaccurately speculated on Twitter in January that she wasn’t eligible to challenge President Trump next year because her parents weren’t American.
Her marriage to a white man, corporate lawyer Doug Emhoff, who is Jewish, has also been highlighted. Obama, in contrast, married Michelle Obama and settled down in Chicago’s South Side, which is predominantly black.
In an interview with The Breakfast Club in February, Harris told radio hosts DJ Envy and Charlamagne Tha God: “I’m black, and I’m proud of being black. I was born black. I will die black. I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”
“I think they don’t understand who black people are. I’m not going to spend my time trying to educate people about who black people are,” she said.
She added: “Look, this is the same thing they did to Barack. This is not new to us and so I think that we know what they are trying to do. They are trying to do what has been happening over the last two years, which is powerful voices trying to sow hate and division among us, and so we need to recognize when we’re being played.”
Minnesota state representative Mohamud Noor, a Somali immigrant who became an elected official, said he’s “heard this story” about whether someone is “black enough” “many times,” but thinks voters will cast ballots for a qualified candidate, regardless of what they look like, if they talk about the issues.
“I consider myself to be part of the African American community, but I did not go through the experience that they did,” Noor explained. “Obama was just the beginning, he wasn’t the end of a black person getting elected.”
It remains to be seen how the crucial voting bloc will perceive some of the tougher positions she adopted as San Francisco’s and then California’s top law enforcement officer.
Some argue that any focus of the “blackness” of Harris is racism, pure and simple. “If you look African American, that’s how you’re perceived, that’s how you’re categorized,” George Mason University political science professor Toni-Michelle Travis told the Washington Examiner.
“To have a father of Jamaican descent means that there was slave ancestry somewhere in that picture because the islands were colonized,” Travis said. “It’s not a Southern state experience, but she’s still a citizen, and race is extremely salient for her at every turn.”
Obama, however, worked hard to boost his credentials with the African American community, stressing his wife Michelle’s family and his role as a community activist in Chicago.
Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, tweeted a thread about why it was legitimate to ask questions about Harris’ black experience.
“I hate to tell people this but there is empirical evidence of different outcomes for immigrant black people versus native born black folk. I don’t know who is saying what but it is disingenuous to suggest this isn’t true,” she wrote in a Twitter thread.
She added: “People aren’t wholesale crazy for debating Kamala’s racial solidarity anymore than they debate it with any other candidate. What I am not going to let people do is pretend that black voters are stupid or wrong for doing what people surely do to us, which is question our bona fides.”
Former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who is critical of Harris on policy grounds, said the discussion of race “is still complicated, personal, and in many respects painful” for any black candidate.
“We need to begin to peel back and address the complications, the personal feelings, and the pain that still lingers around the subject. Until we’re honest about doing that, we’re basically going to always come back to moments that you’re covering right now, where a candidate gets up on stage and says or addresses race the way Kamala did, or the way Joe Biden did.”
It remained to be seen, he said, whether “we’re still going to make a big deal of it” or instead “see that moment as part of a continuum of moments that we need to have to help us move forward away from this racist, segregationist, slave history of the country.”
