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What Donald Trump doesn’t understand about race in America

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It’s the early aughts, and I’m in a taxi, heading once again to the airport, one of many assignments that kept my passport brimming with stamps — and my suitcase constantly packed. It’s 4 in the morning, and I’m trying to catch some zzzs as we head to Dulles.

My West African cabbie peers at me through his rear view mirror.

“What are you?” he demands.

“Excuse me?”

“What are you?”

“I’m Black.”

“I do not believe you!” he says, looking at me incredulously and throwing out some other, more believable — to him — options: Latina? South Asian? Middle Eastern?

“I’m Black.”

“You look like your mother is white and your father is Black.”

“They’re Black, too.”

“Then how do you account for your white appearance?” he spat.

Now, with my curly hair, honey brown skin and bumpy nose, I’ve been mistaken for many things, from Puerto Rican to Pakistani, from Brazilian to Bangladeshi, but being told I have a “white appearance” was a first. For my entire life, ever since I was a second grader at St. Joseph Hill Academy in Staten Island, I’ve been fielding the what-are-you question. But it’s early, really really early, and I am not in the mood.

Then how do you account for your white appearance?

“Slavery.”

And that, finally, ended the grilling.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation a lot lately as the controversy over Kamala Harris’ racial identity resurfaces once again. Is she Black? Is she Indian? What is she, really? This week, while speaking at a press conference at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago, former President Donald Trump threw a Molotov cocktail into the debate.

“She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said of Harris. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago until she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.”

The audience gasped. I did, too.

Still, I shouldn’t be surprised: Politicians in this country have been using race as a way to discredit their opponents for forever. When Republican Warren Harding was running for president back in 1920, his Democratic opponents spread rumors that he was hiding his true Black identity. Gossip that he was “touched by the tar brush” dogged him for the rest of his life. (DNA testing of his relatives later revealed that Harding had no discernible African ancestry.)

For most of its history, America decreed that anyone with any African ancestry was Black — and rumors of purported Blackness could derail a career, a marriage, a life. Now, the irony is that some feel comfortable accusing those same people of making up their Blackness altogether — or not being “fully Black” if they come from multiple racial backgrounds.

But the problem with trying to decide who qualifies as Black and who doesn’t is that there are many, many ways to be Black in America, thanks largely to slavery.

I’m Black and I have two Black-identifying parents who also had two Black-identifying parents. You have to go back generations to find the white folks in our family tree, but their existence is there, evident in the texture of our hair, the hue of our skin, the slant of our noses. (And in our 23andMe genetic testing results.) We are the result of centuries of miscegenation, generations of Black biracial people marrying other Black biracial people (and the occasional Native American) again and again and again, descendants of both the enslaved and the enslavers, born perhaps of love, but most certainly, from rape. In the U.S. — but not so much in other countries — that potent gumbo of DNA makes us (happily) Black.

Harris, with her sleek blowout and cafe-au-lait skin, would fit right in at our family reunion. After all, on her Jamaican side, she comes from a very similar genetic soup, also a product of that island’s legacy of slavery. To be Black in the Americas is to be racially mixed, dating back to the earliest Colonial days, when enslaved Africans lived with, worked with, rebelled with and had babies with indentured Europeans and Native Americans.

The longer you’ve been in this country, no matter your racial identity, the more likely you are to be mixed race. There are historically mixed-race populations dotted throughout the U.S., from the French-speaking Louisiana Creoles (my people) to the Melungeons of Appalachia, to the WeSorts of Maryland to the Punjabi-Mexicans of California to the descendants of the Filipino sailors who settled in the Louisiana bayou in the 1760s.

The average African American has about a quarter European ancestry. But some of us are a little more miscegenated than others. In my family, for example, DNA results from different members have ranged from 49-70 percent European. One of my besties, who is a very fair-skinned, biracial Black woman, is afraid to get her DNA tested for fear she’ll be less than 10 percent Black — even though her identity is firmly African American.

But for most of American history, “mixed” just wasn’t an option. Thanks to the one drop ruleif you had any African ancestry, even if you had blonde hair and blue eyes and white skin, that made you legally Black in America’s racial caste system — and subject to the brutality of slavery and Jim Crow laws and all the other indignities of second-class citizenship.

In other words, in this country, whiteness has long been defined by the absence of Blackness. But Blackness has never been defined by the absence of whiteness. Many of the biggest Black political figures in the U.S. are visibly mixed race — most, like me, the result of multiple generations of amalgamating: Frederick Douglass. Booker T. Washington. W.E.B. DuBois. Walter White of the NAACP. Rosa Parks. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Malcolm X. Angela Davis. Reps. Harold Ford Sr. and Harold Ford Jr. Sen. Cory Booker…

Being Black in America, that is, being Black with roots in antebellum America, has less to do with skin tone and everything to do with the legacy of slavery. And that legacy of forced servitude — and forced sex — isn’t a pretty story to tell. Americans tend to have amnesia about this less-than-savory aspect of our history, as if race-mixing in America didn’t commence until 1967, when the Supreme Court said it was OK, in Loving v. Virginia.

Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, the children of immigrants, don’t come saddled with that exact history. Immigration has further complicated the ingredients in America’s racial gumbo. Their family stories of 60s-era interracial love are a striking departure from the stain of American-style racism and slavery — even though both identify as Black, while embracing the non-Black parts of their ancestry, too. Their perceived “otherness” provides an exotic narrative, a blank slate for people to project their hopes and aspirations onto — and their biases. When Obama, the son of a white American mother and a Black Kenyan father, was elected, some saw him as “a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.”

That post-racial, Kumbaya moment didn’t last long, though. Obama, a Hawaii native, famously faced accusations, led by Trump, that he wasn’t born in this country, that he was both a Muslim and a Kenyan, which his accusers argued made him both suspect and ineligible to be president. On his radio show, the late Rush Limbaugh played a song dubbed, “Barack the Magic Negro.” Meanwhile, critics on the right have cast aspersions on Harris’s race and gender, calling her a “DEI hire” and Jezebel and “the original ‘Hawk Tuah’ girl” who slept her way to the top.

Then there are folks who insist Obama and Harris aren’t really Black. And sometimes those accusations come from other Black people. When he was running for president in 2016, Republican Ben Carson, who is African American, said of Obama, “He was raised white. … So, for him to, you know, claim that, you know, he identifies with the experience of Black Americans, I think, is a bit of a stretch.” Meanwhile, detractors like Jason Whitlock of BlazeTV adamantly deny that Harris, the daughter of a Tamil Indian mother and an Afro-Jamaican father, is Black.

“Her pretending to be a Black woman, that’s an affront to me,” Whitlock, who is Black, said on the Liz Wheeler Show. “She’s piggybacking something that her family heritage has nothing to do with. Her mother is an Indian; her father is from Jamaica. She’s not a part of the people whose ancestors were slaves. This is just like a grift, no different than Barack Obama who used it as a grift to advance his career. … We gotta call this out for what it is.”

Some find Harris’ Jamaican ancestry suspect, pointing out that her father is a descendant of a slave-owning family on the island, and therefore, that means she’s not Black. (Never mind the island’s history of racial blending or that pictures of her Jamaican ancestors clearly look like they had at least partial African ancestry.)

I’m the descendant of slave-owning plantation owners, too. That doesn’t make me not Black. In fact, that’s a uniquely Black experience, wherever you may hail from in the African diaspora.

Whether Harris and Obama are being dragged for being too Black, or for not being Black at all, the political point is the same: to discredit them. Casting aspersions on a political leader’s racial identity is a less-than-subtle way to paint them as broadly inauthentic — and therefore not to be trusted.

But here’s the thing: “Black” in America is a very broad umbrella. United, with our myriad iterations of skin color and hair texture and life experiences, we are a powerful political force.

Which might explain why Trump feels a need to discredit Harris’s identity. While Joe Biden was the presumed Democratic nominee, Trump’s support among Black voters was on the rise, particularly among Black men.

Is he afraid that Harris might draw them back?

Race is a construct, as the scientists keep trying to tell us, and an arbitrary one at that. But it is a construct with real-life consequences. For decades, the taint of Blackness in America determined whom you were allowed to marry, where you were allowed to live, whether or not you were allowed to vote, what kind of education you got, whether or not you could get a loan, where you were allowed to sit on public transportation — even the kind of medical care you got.

Most of us who grew up Black in this country juggled multiple identities, even if we had two Black parents. Remember, just one drop of African blood made you Black in America — even if it was literally 1/32 percent. And until recently, you could only check one race on the U.S. Census, even though more than 33 million Americans identify as multiracial, a number that is likely an underestimate.

If you’re light-skinned, ie., “red bone” or “high yella” or “high brown,” with a lot of visible white ancestry, back in the day, that white-adjacent-ness came with a certain degree of privilege. (And still does.) Maybe your “light, bright and damn near white” appearance made white folks more willing to hire you. Or maybe you had white family who, if they bothered to acknowledge their Black/mixed-race kin, might’ve helped you out with an education or some land, as one of my great-great grandfathers in Louisiana reportedly did for one of my great-grandfathers.

That legacy of rape, and illegitimacy and bondage made for a perverted racial pecking order, where the lighter your skin and the straighter your hair, ie., the closer you were to white, the more desirable you were deemed to be, whether you were in the market for a job — or a spouse. As Big Bill Broonzy sang more than 80 years ago, “if you was white, you’re alright/if you was brown, stick around/but if you’s Black, oh brother, get back, get back, get back.”

Some Black folks of a lighter hue, looking to escape the societal limitations placed on Blackness, took advantage of their racial ambiguity and passed for white or Indian or whatever they could, leaving behind family and loved ones in search of a better life. (Albeit a better life filled with secrets.) But we Black folks have got “the sight.” We can almost always tell our own, even when white folks are fooled.

Blackness is in the eye of the beholder, which is to say, what’s Black in America isn’t Black elsewhere, as my West African cabbie made clear. You might be “indio” in the Dominican Republic or “mulato” in Cuba, “pardo” in Brazil, “coloured” in South Africa like Grammy-winning singer Tyla — or “brownin” in Jamaica. (If you’re Indian and Black, like Harris or U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, and you’re from Jamaica or Trinidad or Guyana, you’re “dougla.”)

We’re all humans, living on this rock we call Earth, making shit up as we go along. It’s our nature to taxonomize people, to put them into neat little categories as if that will explain their existence to us — and where they belong on the totem pole.

Kamala Harris knows all this, as she navigates her dueling identities, dancing in a drum line HBCU-style, making dosas with Mindy Kaling or showing a picture of an Afro-ed baby Kamala as she discusses her hair care routine.

She is Indian. And Black.

Which makes her Black.

She knows who she is. She has said that when she was growing up, her mother “instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots.” But her mom also understood that she was raising two Black daughters. She “knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”

“I’m Black, and I’m proud of being Black,” she also said. “I was born Black. I will die Black, and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”

We can — and should — take her word for it.


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