Understanding Race Through a Personal Lens
As a child, I vividly remember the day my father sat my older sister and me down in our living room to discuss the complexities of race in America. A Black man born in Mississippi, he carried the weight of a history fraught with violence, where Black boys could be lynched for merely standing too close to a white woman. He met my white mother in 1972, just a few years after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Loving v. Virginia, which finally dismantled over three centuries of laws prohibiting interracial marriage. This context shaped my father’s understanding of the world, and he felt it was essential to prepare us for the realities we would face. He told us that while our mother might be white, it was irrelevant to how society would perceive and treat us. In this country, our identity was clear: we were Black.
What my father shared that day merely confirmed an awareness I had already developed. Growing up amidst a vibrant tapestry of aunts, uncles, cousins, and my beloved grandmama from my father’s side, I was just another child in a large Black family. My mother was often the only white person at our family gatherings, which were filled with laughter, love, and an unspoken understanding of our shared heritage. Several times a year, we would travel about an hour away to rural Iowa to visit my white grandparents. They adored us, yet they lived in a predominantly white world that we never fully belonged to.
I cannot pinpoint exactly how I knew I was Black before my father’s conversation, but that knowledge was palpable. It was a truth that everyone around me recognized. With my white family, I was not entirely white but rather part white. In the broader context of America and among my Black family, I was unequivocally Black. The societal rules surrounding race are so deeply entrenched that they often go unchallenged.
Recently, former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee, made headlines by addressing a gathering of Black journalists. He suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother is of Indian descent and whose father is Jamaican, “was always of Indian heritage” and “now wants to be known as Black.” This statement reflects a troubling historical amnesia about the country he seeks to lead.
By implying that there was something disingenuous or politically calculated about a mixed-race individual claiming Blackness as part of her identity, Trump overlooked the fact that Harris’s racial identity was established at her birth, due to her Black father. This orchestrated forgetfulness is not new; we witnessed it during Barack Obama’s ascent to becoming the first Black president. It seems that whenever a mixed-race Black American rises to positions of power, some segments of white America conveniently forget the racial rules they themselves have established.
Trump’s questioning of Harris’s legitimacy as a Black person was quickly met with backlash, as Harris has long identified as Black. In her 2019 autobiography, she recounted a similar experience to mine, where her Indian mother clarified Harris’s Black identity. Harris wrote: “My mother understood very well 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 ensure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.” Moreover, Harris attended one of the most prestigious historically Black universities and became a member of the nation’s oldest Black sorority, further solidifying her identity.
