It is no coincidence that former President and President-elect Donald Trump’s recent comment that Kamala Harris “happened to turn Black” after having been “Indian all the way”echoes the same speculation around President Obama’s race during his campaign and presidency that Trump spread years earlier.
The language of Trump’s “[I]s she Indian or is she Black?” is largely similar to an NBC article “Obama’s true colors: Black, white … or neither?” When a multiracial person enters the political sphere, they disrupt a space that has historically been white and homogenous. Despite all contemporary knowledge about genetics, heredity and identity, it is apparently unfathomable that a person can be of more than one race.
Indeed, racial identification produces so much debate precisely because it has little to do with science and more to do with arbitrary social constructs, causing racially mixed individuals to adopt strategies to resolve the “issue” of their identity.
Obama and Harris took different paths, with Obama leaning towards singularly identifying as Black, and Harris identifying with her different backgrounds. Both are valid ways of coping with a society that treats complex identities as complications, but Harris’ approach represents a step towards a more holistic identity expression.
Obama’s adoption of a singular identity is evidenced by reporting “Black” in the U.S. Census rather than both “Black” and “white.” The public reinforced a singular identity by calling him the first Black president of the United States, not the first biracial president of the United States.
The inclination to place multiracial individuals into binary categories is largely rooted in essentialism, or the belief that category membership is static and innate. It is also hypodescent: the tendency, when picking a singular category of one’s identity, for people to automatically choose the more marginalized group.
This explains why people label Obama as “Black” rather than “biracial” or “white,” since Blackness is perceived as “subordinate” to whiteness in the American racial hierarchy. So although Obama is roughly as Black as he is white in terms of heritage, both the public and Obama himself default to the Black label.
With Kamala Harris, the relevance of hypodescent is less certain, as Blackness is not so clearly socially subordinate to Indianness as it is to whiteness. Accordingly, others are more likely to acknowledge both aspects of her identity.
In line with others’ perceptions of her, she flexibly expresses her racial identity rather than singularly identifying as Black or Indian. The response to Trump’s question, “[I]s she Indian or is she Black?” then becomes less binary, and the essentialist view where everyone is assigned to a singular category is disrupted. Harris’ complex racial identity is not a matter of changing her race at will; it’s a testament to the fluidity of race, especially for individuals with diverse heritage.
The Multidimensional Model of Racial Identity is a helpful tool for understanding Obama and Harris’ different approaches to race. It proposes that four main factors contribute to racial self-identification: salience (how relevant race is in a given context), centrality (how much a person emphasizes race as part of their identity), regard (how positively or negatively a person feels about their racial group) and ideology (what they believe about how people in their racial group should act).
For Obama, race was more salient and central to his position in the political realm. The United States had never had a Black president before, so Obama’s Blackness became the most remarkable aspect of his identity. With Harris, on the other hand, both her race and gender were remarkable because we had never had a woman of color hold office as vice president.
Furthermore, Obama is remembered as the first Black president, while Harris is the first female, Black and Asian American vice president. The multiple “firsts” in her title inherently divide focus, while Obama’s singular “first” allows for a clearer central position. This could help further explain why Obama tends to identify as solely Black, while Harris identifies more flexibly.
Despite external pressures to choose one race, as with Obama identifying as solely Black or Harris “turning Black” in the national political sphere, these individuals often have a nuanced understanding of their identities. Harris, for example, embraces both her Black and Indian heritage and, in doing so, can express the fullness of her identity without having to pick a static category.
In politics especially, people will have to get used to the presence of complex identities in historically homogeneous spaces. What has long been posed as a “problem” of identity is, in fact, an opportunity.
The diversity of background, experience and identity that figures like Obama and Harris bring to the political realm isn’t just a step forward — it’s essential for representing our country’s diversity.
Jasmine Harrison PO ’27 is an English and psychology major from Los Angeles. She enjoys reading, crocheting and doing ballet in her spare time.
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