Presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris has opted to follow former President Barack Obama’s playbook on race when it comes to marginalizing, if not outright ignoring, her Tamil heritage.
During an interview with a New York City radio talk show host who likens himself to a deity (“Charlamagne Tha God”) Harris exclaimed “I’m black, and I’m proud of being black. I was born black. I will die black.” The senator’s mother was born in what is now the city of Chennai in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Her father is Jamaican.
Civil rights leaders regarded Obama as not authentically black prior to his 2008 White House bid. Despite membership in fiercely racialist Jeremiah Wright’s south Chicago congregation, Obama had zero ties to the southern black church which spawned the civil rights movement and most of its notables. Additionally, Obama was born in Hawaii, lived four years in Indonesia and was (gasp!) half white.
The former president attempted to mitigate those shortcomings by adopting an ironclad black identity, even proclaiming that he listed himself as such on the 2010 Census because, in his mind, that’s how society viewed him. That rationale runs counter to the philosophy that how one views oneself is more important than societally imposed identities, a worldview that a growing number of mixed-race Americans embrace.
The 2020 Census will be the third in which multiracials will be able to choose multiple boxes, albeit with the caveat that government number crunchers may manipulate or collapse those responses to reflect exclusively minority race tabulations. This counting scheme echoes the white supremacist proposition that any degree of African ancestry makes one entirely black, “the one-drop rule.” Compounded with high-profile politicos willfully one-dropping themselves, mixed-race Americans are rightfully concerned that the government might shelve the multiple box option altogether.
At this stage in the presidential race, an uneasy awareness grows among the mixed-race that Kamala Harris may wind up being a female Obama, someone willing to place pronounced hybridity a distant second behind political expediency. Her eagerness to proclaim herself the only black female on the debate stage that night in Miami as she tore into former Vice President Joe Biden’s stance on busing to achieve integration came across as contrived, not to mention that she imposed a racial designation on South India’s Tamil population that they reject.
In fairness, during Charlamagne Tha God’s interview, Harris fended off criticism regarding her stint as California Attorney General and her prosecution of violent criminals, but this “progressive” disparagement creates a false narrative that African-Americans don’t want law enforcement. With blacks overrepresented every year in FBI crime categories from murder down to curfew law violations, the people crying out the loudest for relief from neighborhood lawlessness are minorities.
Obama and Harris aren’t the only examples of prominent politicians identifying solely with one aspect of their heritage. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., “passed for white” while attending Colgate University but later opted to champion the black cause by representing Harlem in Congress. Why? Everett Stonequist, sociologist and author of The Marginal Man (1937), theorized: “By losing himself in a cause larger than himself the marginal nationalist overrides, if he does not solve, his own personal conflicts.”
Stonequist posited that a primary cause of the mulatto’s emergence as race leader is “the disparity between his aspirations and his status.” This disparity will “make him the kind of marginal man who integrates his personality through reacting back to the Negro group and working to raise its status.”
Harris is not mulatta, but it is valid to ask whether adopting an exclusive black identity is a calculated decision predicated upon, as Stonequist suggests, a perceived gap between her aspirations and her mixed background.
South India’s sages would counsel Harris that a true teacher doesn’t instruct you so much as she, like a mirror, reflects back your own inner knowing, and lovingly reminds you of the vastness of your being. The opportunity to heal this nation’s racial strife by reflecting back to us our innate capacity to heal by reflecting back to us that Americans are more racially blended than social justice warriors will admit, awaits one with a sufficiently elevated consciousness.
Charles Michael Byrd (@ChasbyrdM) is a freelance opinion writer whose pieces deal with racial identity politics and religion. He is of white, black, and Cherokee heritage. He lives in Queens, N.Y.
