Mixed Race Studies

Kamala Harris grew up in a mostly white world. Then she went to a black university in a black city.

The Washington Post
2019-09-16

Robin Givhan, Fashion critic

From left: Karen Gibbs, Kamala Harris and Valerie Pippen at Homecoming in 1986-1987. (Courtesy of Karen Gibbs)

When anyone challenges her racial identity, the presidential candidate points to her four years at Howard University.

Kamala Harris wanted to go to a black school. That’s what black folks called Howard University in the early 1980s when Harris was a teenager considering her future.

Harris, she would say later, was seeking an experience wholly different from what she had long known. She’d attended majority-white schools her entire life — from elementary school in Berkeley, Calif., to high school in Montreal. Her parents’ professional lives and their personal story were bound up in majority-white institutions. Her father, an economist from Jamaica, was teaching at Stanford University. Her mother, a cancer researcher from India, had done her graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where the couple had met and fallen in love. And Harris’s younger sister would eventually enroll at Stanford.

Harris wanted to be surrounded by black students, black culture and black traditions at the crown jewel of historically black colleges and universities…

Read the entire article here.

Kamala Harris Has No Problem Being Black, But Why Doesn’t She Say Publicly She’s Part Asian?

Diverse: Issues In Higher Education
2019-06-30

Emil Guillermo

Kamala Harris likes to say she’s American. Of course. But she’s not generic. Her racial subtext is this: On her father’s side she’s half-Jamaican, and on her mother’s side she’s half-Asian Indian. Harris should say it proudly and often. Because there’s a lot of misunderstanding out there. Just ask Donald Trump Jr.

He never heard that she was half-Asian (Then again, he thought that meeting in Trump Tower was about Russian adoptions or something).

When it comes to Harris, I like pointing out her Asian side often because wouldn’t that be cool to have the first Asian American president of the United States be half-Black and a woman?

The 2020 Democratic presidential field is nothing but diverse, filled with a demography of riches. There’s men, women, young, old, gay, straight, from North, South, East, West, and Wester (Hawaii), Blacks, Latino and Asians, all of whom yearning for the chance to say they too “Habla Espanol.”

But of them all, I’d say Harris has emerged as diversity’s candidate. She’s what America’s becoming. She’s the face of the American future, mixed race, not just one thing. And definitely she’s not White, though she married one. Diversity!…

Read the entire article here.

Kamala Harris, Birtherism, Race and the Unscrupulous, Sinister Antics of the Far Right!

Medium
2019-07-04

Elwood Watson, Professor of History, African American Studies and Gender Studies
East Tennessee State University

Now that she has emerged as a serious contender for the 2020 democratic nomination for president, Kamala Harris has come under attack from a number of conservative political outlets. Various segments of the right wing echo chamber immediately began working overtime in an effort to discredit the former California attorney general, now U.S. Senator.

Partisan knives have been purchased, sharpened and some have been employed by their unethical owners in an unabashed effort to attempt to stab and discredit the senator’s claim of American roots. Fortunately, for Harris, her formidable mental agility coupled with her acute political acumen has been a tremendous weapon to protect herself and stave off a vicious onslaught of treacherous and wicked attacks.

The most recent genesis of such a sinister ploy originated by a Black conservative internet blogger, Ali Alexander whose online identity was previously known as Ali Akbar and Ali Abdul Razaq Akbar. Alexander is a Black right wing, MAGA-world internet personality who crafted and engineered a website for similar, conspiratorial, like-minded fringe elements of the extreme right who were unable or in some cases, unwilling to either embrace or find a stable home in more mainstream conservative media circles…

Read the entire article here.

Social media trolls try but fail to give Kamala Harris the Obama-birther treatment

Think Progress
2019-07-01

Sam Fulwood III

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – JUNE 30: Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) greets attendees during the SF Pride Parade on June 30, 2019 in San Francisco, California. An online smear campaign targeted Harris over the weekend, arguing she’s not a black American and raising fears of birtherism and racism intruding into the 2020 campaign. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Birtherism raises its ugly head, only to be lopped off by Harris supporters and rivals

A birther-style attack against Sen. Kamala Harris’ campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination failed to take hold after legions of her online supporters — including most of her political opponents — rushed to denounce social media postings challenging her legitimacy to speak as a black American.

Harris spoke passionately about racial issues during last week’s Democratic debate, and since then a misguided series of social media posts began sprouting on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter suggesting that her parentage — Harris’ mother was Tamil Indian and her father is Jamaican — disqualified her from the community of black people in the United States.

At one point in last week’s debate, Harris interrupted crosstalk on stage, demanding to be heard as “the only black person on this stage” during a heated discussion of racial justice policy.

At another point, Harris described her feelings confronting racism as a child. “Growing up, my sister and I had to deal with the neighbor who told us her parents said she couldn’t play with us because … we were black.”…

Read the entire article here.

“My mother understood she was raising two black children to be black women,” [Kamala] Harris said in the interview, a line she has often used to settle questions on the subject. Shyamala Gopalan Harris encouraged her daughter to go to Howard [University], a school her mother knew well, having guest lectured there and having friends on the faculty.

“There was nothing unnatural or in conflict about it at all,” Harris said. “There were a lot of kids at Howard who had a background where one parent was maybe from the Philippines and the other might be from Nairobi,” she added. “Howard encompasses the [African] diaspora.”

Evan Halper, “A political awakening: How Howard University shaped Kamala Harris’ identity,” The Los Angeles Times, March 19, 2019. https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-kamala-harris-howard-university-20190319-story.html.

A political awakening: How Howard University shaped Kamala Harris’ identity

The Los Angeles Times
2019-03-19

Evan Halper

Kamala Harris, right, protests South African apartheid with classmate Gwen Whitfield on the National Mall in November 1982. (Photo courtesy of Kamala Harris)

The war on drugs had erupted, apartheid was raging, Jesse Jackson would soon make the campus a staging ground for his inaugural presidential bid. Running for student office in 1982 at Howard University — the school that nurtured Thurgood Marshall, Toni Morrison and Stokely Carmichael — was no joke.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) has been known to break the ice with voters by proclaiming the freshman-year campaign in which she won a seat on the Liberal Arts Student Council her toughest political race. Those who were at the university with her are not so sure she is kidding.

It was at Howard that the senator’s political identity began to take shape. Thirty-three years after she graduated in 1986, the university in the nation’s capital, one of the country’s most prominent historically black institutions, also serves as a touchstone in a campaign in which political opponents have questioned the authenticity of her black identity.

“I reference often my days at Howard to help people understand they should not make assumptions about who black people are,” Harris said in a recent interview…

Read the entire article here.

It’s 2019, Why Are We Still Policing Blackness?

My American Melting Pot
2019-03-01

Lori L. Tharps, Host, Head Chef and Chief Content Creator; Associate Professor of journalism
Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Hello Meltingpot Readers,

As we wind down the Blackest month of the year, I wanted to write something positive and inspirational about Black people in America. Instead, I’m using this penultimate Black History Month blog post to lament the continuous policing of Blackness…

Read the entire article here.

Yes, Kamala Harris is ‘black enough’

The Boston Globe
2019-02-19

Renée Graham, Globe Columnist

Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff United States Senator Kamala Harris answers a question during “Politics & Eggs” at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics St. at Anselm College in Manchester, Feb. 19.

The presidential hopeful knew the comment was coming.

“There are African-Americans who don’t think you’re black enough, who don’t think you’ve had the required experience,” said the white journalist, trailing off before he could define “the required experience.” In a voiceover, he’d already mentioned that the politician was “not a descendant of slaves,” as if that fact automatically impugns black authenticity.

The candidate gave a slight, weary smile and responded, “I am rooted in the African-American community, but I’m not defined by it. I am comfortable in my racial identity, but that’s not all I am.”

That exchange is from a 2007 “60 Minutes” segment with Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother. Now Senator Kamala Harris, daughter of a Jamaican father and Tamil Indian mother, is being subjected to the same inane racial purity questions…

Read the entire article here.

Kamala Harris’s record and character matter — not the race of her father and husband

The Washington Post
2019-02-22

Colbert I. King

Sen. Kamala D. Harris arrives at a Harlem restaurant in New York for lunch with the Rev. Al Sharpton on Thursday. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

California Democratic Sen. Kamala D. Harris hardly had time to finish basking in the glow of her presidential bid’s five-star rollout before 20,000 adoring Oakland hometown fans, when two black-media-inspired questions hit her in the face: Why did she marry a white man? And: Is she black enough?

Harris has answers to both questions. They will appear in this column. But let’s take a look at why these questions turn up in a presidential contest.

Questions about race, sex and interracial coupling aren’t new. Warring over them is older than the Republic…

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In Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, Indian Americans want more opportunities to connect

NBC News
2019-02-12

Chris Fuchs

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., at a rally launching her presidential campaign on Jan. 27 in Oakland, California. Noah Berger / AFP – Getty Images

While the California Democrat has caught the eyes of South Asian voters, some say her ethnic background isn’t enough for them to identify with her.

Shiv Dass, 82, recalls fondly the time he met Hillary Clinton when she visited Jackson Heights, in the Queens borough of New York City, while campaigning in the 2016 presidential election.

Dass, the owner of Lavanya, an Indian apparel store on 74th Street for almost a quarter century, described the Clintons as having a close relationship with the Indian-American community, owing in part to what he said was Bill Clinton’s support of India when he was president.

Now that a woman with Indian roots, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., is running in the 2020 presidential race, Dass, a Democrat, will have some decisions to make.

“I am proud that she is Indian, but I will not support her because she is Indian,” Dass, who immigrated to the United States in 1966, said. “I will support her if she is good for us, good for the country.”

Harris, who kicked off her campaign in her hometown of Oakland in late January, was born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. She supports policies such as Medicare for all, debt-free college, and a tax cut that will benefit working families…

Read the entire article here.