'Mixed-Race'. Why Is That So Hard To Say?
Kamala Harris Could Be Our SECOND Mixed-Race President.
What’s not to love here?
It’s been a week ago that Donald Trump appeared on a panel at an NABJ convention. That’s the National Association of Black Journalists. As usual he delivered juicy sound-bites for Democrats to use against him.
”I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I did not know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black.”
“I respect either one,” he added, “but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn and … she became a Black person.”
Ironically, VP Harris’s next appearance was at a gathering of an historically African American sorority. She mentioned his remarks only in passing, halfway through her speech, dismissing him and saying that America deserves better. Then she quickly moved on. Perhaps she felt a little awkward?
Perhaps she felt that Trump had set her up, knowing that she’d have to respond to his comments to a roomful of women. Most of whom are more ‘Black’ than she is.
I really don’t believe in ‘race’. I think the whole concept is socially constructed. I see it as a mostly meaningless way of categorizing people according to characteristics that we should learn to ignore. Nevertheless, racial classifications still hold tremendous power in our national dialogue, and in our elections.
So I decided to write about it through the particular lens offered by Trump’s remarks and the response from Harris’s supporters. Forgive me if I ramble a bit.
I sometimes mention how racially diverse Altadena is. I moved here in 2000. And I quickly made friends with a group of people at the local coffee house. There was a large round table that dominated the floor near the front door, and every Saturday and Sunday morning, six or eight locals at a time who liked to share their opinions, would gather and do just that.
’The Round Table’, as we naturally called it, was where you went to find out what your neighbors thought about things. Usually there were a couple of newspapers being sectioned out, and it was never long before one of these folks weighed in on a story’s topic, and off we’d go into spirited discussion. Most of these folks were liberal, but not all, and no single racial group dominated.
That coffee house sat on Lake Avenue, which runs from Pasadena, north until it dead-ends into the San Gabriel Mountains. Lake was once the dividing line between African American and Caucasian, with whites mainly occupying the areas to the east of Lake, and Blacks living to the west.
This boundary had become blurred long before I moved here, but even today, you will see evidence of that obsolete color-line, only now there are a lot of Armenians settled at Altadena’s easterly edges, and as many Hispanics to the west as there are Black People.
It was common knowledge years ago at The Round Table, that there was roughly a 40-30 split between white and Black respectively in our town. With maybe 20% Latino and the rest Armenian. Whites were the biggest single demographic ‘group’, but by numbers, there were more people of color.
In our little self-selected discussion group, all were of equal standing. On occasion, when one of the Black participants said something that was clearly wrong, the white folks would be reluctant to correct it - this carefulness being endemic with white progressives in mixed-race situations - but for the most part we hashed it out good naturedly without regard to skin color.
It helped that the richest regular was African American; a news-director at ABC’s Los Angeles affiliate, if memory serves. He might also have been the best educated. He was certainly among the most opinionated. But on any given day, any one of us might have the rhetorical upper hand.
This discussion went on for years, until Julie - the proprietor - moved to Florida. The new owners had no clue as to what made Altadena what it was. They quickly removed everything funky and familiar from that treasured community hub. Of course, The Round Table was the first thing to go.
Now there was no central place where Black folks and white folks could connect in unguarded discussion about ideas and issues that really matter.
But the ease with which the color-line blurs in this little foothill town, has continued. These days the percentage of whites here is statistically about the same. But African American numbers have dropped some. And here’s the interesting fact. At almost the same rate that Black has shrunk, ‘multiracial’ has grown.
If you moved here from someplace where Blacks and whites don’t often marry and have kids, it might take a little getting used to. But us long-time locals don’t bat an eye when we see a white mom corralling two or three darker-skinned kids through the local supermarket.
Until 1948, there were ‘anti-miscegenation’ laws on the books in California. But we’ve been stirring the genetic pot out here for a very long time. My own wife was half Mexican. Her dad, of mutt-British ancestry like my own, married not one but two first-generation Mexican-American Women. First Alice, and then Lupe.
Ali was my wife’s mom. But Chuck’s second wife was our kids’ main Nana, taking our two toddlers into her home when my wife and I were both working full time. Lupe had five grown children by her first husband, who was also first generation Hispanic. By the time we were grafted into her extended family, all of those kids had their own kids. And some of those kids were half-Black and half-Hispanic. Our own 1/4 Hispanic kids were as much a part of her brood as any of the others.
It’s probably no surprise that my son married into another big tight-knit Latino family. His wife Jasmine, is the daughter of two first generation Mexican-Americans.
So this wrangling over how ‘black’ Kamala Harris is or isn’t, strikes me as a little bit silly. If Trump ever did one bit of research before he runs his mouth, he’d have some chance of being coherent, and of not choking on his wingtips.
But he’s at least partially right about Kamala Harris not being heavily identified as Black early in her ascension to state-wide politics. I distinctly remember seeing her on the news a couple of times, as Attorney General, and not having any clue about what her ancestry might be. I just remember thinking that she was kinda hot. (hey, what can I say?)
I remember searching her online and seeing her official portrait as California Attorney General. I’ve lined it up here - left to right - with the official portraits of her next two important jobs, US Senator, and Vice President of The United States.
To my eye, the woman on the left looks exactly like a white woman. The woman on the right, however, does look somewhat African American. (though she wouldn’t have to spend much time in the Black hair-care department of the Altadena Rite-Aid)
As best as I can recall, it wasn’t until her run for Barbara Boxer’s vacated Senate seat, that the idea of her being the ‘First African American Senator From California’, hit critical mass. Her key endorsement came from ‘First Black President’, Barrack Obama.
Truthfully, until then I never thought of her as Black. Or as Indian for that matter.
In Trump’s infinitely ham-fisted way, he was trying to poke fun at the general obsession left-of-center with the concept of ‘First Black’. Appointing and electing African Americans to posts and offices previously only held by white people. Why he thought that a gathering of African American Journalists was the right venue for such fun-poking will always be a mystery. But let’s take an honest unbiased look at what he was digging at.
The whole social-justice mission is based on a struggle between Oppressor and Oppressed. Wherever there is a group with an immutable characteristic that can plausibly be seen as a lever by which others are holding them back, progressives are on the case.
The advancement particularly of Black Americans into powerful positions, is naturally the most compelling goal of this greater project. Because ‘slavery’ is the starkest example of a complete lack of power. A whole class of human beings living their entire lives in bondage, so that their so-called ‘masters’ could luxuriate in the mansion on the hill. Just writing that sentence gave me chills.
For the generation of progressives who are just a little too young to have taken direct part in The Civil Rights Movement, there is an aching in the heart. NPR takes every opportunity to remind its tens of millions of white listeners that they are the beneficiaries of this historic horror. It’s an empathetic loop on never-ending replay.
Progressive boomers have genuinely NEEDED to see Black mayors and governors and judges and police chiefs, and most importantly, Black Presidents Of The United States. First a man, and then a woman. This has been a sort of ‘bucket list’ for progressives who were in grade school when their older cousins were running off to march with Dr. King.
This is seen and felt as an attempt to right the scales of history, and to pay down a debt that can never be fully settled.
Maybe Trump wanted the Black Journalists present to remember that Kamala Harris - like Barrack Obama before her - can trace no lineage to slaves held on American soil. Thereby cutting into her street cred.
But whatever the case, the fact remains that a woman who is at least somewhat Black is killing it on the campaign trail, bringing the gold-ring of First Black Woman President within tantalizing reach.
Let’s be frank here. There are simply not enough fully Black Americans - who are also descended from slaves - running for any office at any one time. Let alone the highest office in the land. If you are trying to create political parity between a group that makes up 69% of the population, and one that makes up less than 13% … you are going to have to fudge the numbers.
This has given us the category of ‘Identifies As Black’.
Barack Obama was raised mostly by his white mother. His high school years were spent on the super-liberal Hawaiian island of Oahu. He then came to the hipster-friendly Los Angeles neighborhood of Eagle Rock, for undergrad studies at overwhelmingly white Occidental College. And he finished up at Harvard Law. It would be a stretch of the imagination to say that his was ‘an authentic African American experience’.
But he ‘identified’ as Black.
He sensed that he had the particular set of skills needed to not only run for president, but to be elected. From the first time we saw Illinois State Senator Obama, making the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, we knew that we were looking at a future president. This was a young bi-racial guy who really understood the mindset of the progressive white boomers who’d spent more time feeling guilty about slavery, than they had with actual African Americans.
Obama was Black yes, but not too Black. (remember when Joe Biden called him ‘clean and articulate’? yikes!)
To his credit, he had been studying up. His work as a community organizer put him into contact with the church-to-power political machine in Chicago’s African American sector. And he married a Black woman with TWO Black parents. So though he probably never faced discrimination other than the positive discrimination of liberals eager to ‘lift up’ talented Black people … he did do his homework.
For her part, half-Indian Kamala Harris spent her high school years in Canada. But at the urging of her parents, she’d previously spent considerable time picking up on African American culture in Berkeley CA. And when it came time for college, she went with D.C.’s historically Black, Howard University. And even joined a sorority.
If it counts to identify as black, it seems that both Obama and Harris have made the effort.
Trump seemed to attack Vice President Harris, for not having identified as Black earlier than she did. But if he was consistent with the general conservative idea that Identity Politics is a dead end, you might think he’d commend her for not using her ethnicity as a lever in a state so desirous of promoting Black Women to powerful offices.
Maybe she chose the least Black-looking photo available, to represent her as AG on state websites … as a way of distancing herself from any unspoken expectation that she would ‘act’ Black. Her positions that played least well with the the deep-blue voters of California? Well those moves by AG Harris could almost have come from a Republican. If anything she played against type, both as San Francisco District Attorney and as Attorney General of California.
But when one of the two entrenched white female Senators retired, and Kamala Harris was in line to be the long anticipated ‘First Black Woman’ to represent the state in the US Senate, of COURSE she was going to highlight her Black side. Her opponent, Lorretta Sanchez, was certainly leaning into her own Hispanic bona fides.
There are only so many earnest social justice warriors still alive, who can say that they were there on the bridge that Bloody Sunday. When Civil Rights marchers weathered baton-blows and tear gas, trying to cross out of Selma to march to Montgomery and the state’s capitol.
But all of us are on another bridge. One that we need to push across. We simply must stop seeing each other as members of racial groups that necessarily think and vote alike. Who can be pitted effectively, one against another, by politicians and media figures who ride our resentments to their own fame and fortune.
I hope that we ramp up our efforts to know one another across the imaginary boundary of race. To have fun together. Do projects together. Argue in good-faith across a round table.
Go on dates, and fall in love and make families together.
What could possibly honor more, those who gave their lives to end slavery, and risked their lives to end the lingering injustices of Jim Crow?
We are so much farther along that path than Dr. King could have imagined. And so doggedly reluctant to admit it.
We may never be color-blind, but we can surely become color-indifferent.
I think that Barrack Obama missed a golden opportunity. Imagine if after he was elected for a second term, he started correcting those who referred to him as Black, saying that he was actually mixed-race. Or bi-racial. Or multiracial. Or blended.
What if he’d used his beloved status and personal charisma to lend a cool factor to being born outside of the old racial boundaries? That’s gradually happening anyway, but more than anybody else, Obama could have boosted that signal. Still could!
I reject the whole idea that there is - and should be - a ‘Black Culture’ to which all African Americans should belong, and that all white Americans ought to steer clear of. That’s completely counter-productive, and is really just another form of segregation. There should be one giant culture for all Americans, which everybody of every color feels free to explore and contribute to, in whatever way feels natural. A culture where genuine self-expression is treasured and skin-color is no more profound than hair color.
Someday, when we finally understand the tribalism born into us, and learn to dial it way down, the people who are cross-pollinating the gene-pool right now, will be seen as the pioneers that they are.
But first, in order to satisfy the bucket list, and finally put a capstone on The Civil Rights Movement, Democrats will put every ounce of their collective energy into electing ‘The First Black Woman President’.
Thanks for reading. -Dave
As per usual, Dave, an eloquent essay that’s as thought-provoking as it is relevant for these times. Growing up in the ‘60’s, I saw firsthand the beauty of affirming others based on who they were as fellow humans, not identified by color or nationality. Somewhere along the way, however, society has lost that perspective—and it’s a damned shame. I do see hope, however. Having dated Hispanic and Black men myself back then, only to see this country become overly sensitive about race these past 50 years, I am now thrilled to see the enduring love between my son and his wife—further proof that love sees no color, only another resonant heart. Like you, it’s been wonderful to mesh two families with more in common than different. Fingers crossed, perhaps our nation can all find seats at that Round Table you enjoyed.
Excellent thoughts, and I'm sharing with friends. My two boys are blended; doesn't seem to bother anyone or limit them in any way at all. Probably because they are nice kids, now adults, and proved themselves along the way. They didn't ride some perceived gravy train to get into school or gain special employment, they just do what anyone raised properly would likely do, get along with friends and family, and not be dependent upon anyone when finally being on their own. They played no "I'm Special" card. That makes them strong. Short story long, I agree with you that far too many people try to pidgeon-hole people into categories. Your text supports that belief, so thanks from someone who thinks the same way.