With Senator Kamala Harris on the verge of officially becoming the Democratic Party's nominee for vice president and the attendant excitement over who she is ethnically I think what I wrote on January 21, 2019 when she announced her candidacy for presidency bears repeating. The image above is from the New York Times of that period.
January 21, 2019
Senator Kamala Harris’s announcement to run for president in 2020 has struck me for one particularly narrow reason. Quite like The New York Times’s tweet above, which describes her as “one of the most prominent black women”, I am sure others too would use the descriptor in slightly varying versions.
The “black” aspect of her identity comes from her father Donald Harris, an immigrant from Jamaica who is a professor of economics at Stanford University. Her mother Shyamala Gopalan, was a Tamilian from India and a breast cancer specialist. If such details matter at all, she would be biracial although serious scientists would tell you race applies to humans in general not a subset. I will let that pass.
Harris is like former President Barack Obama who too is biracial with a black Kenyan father and white American mother. However, he too has been firmly called America’s first “black” president.
What is common here is the ease with which the media and others use the paternal identity as the predominant, overarching identity to the exclusion of the maternal side. In so much as such narrow definitions matter at all—to me they absolutely do not—it would be useful, even essential, to be accurate because neither Harris nor Obama are just children of their fathers.
If we must live in a politically correct society, how about correcting this ridiculously sexist, not to mention racially exclusionary, descriptor?
I personally think there is absolutely no need to add the candidate’s pigment or lineage or genetic history. The media ought to recognize that as a rule voters have a pair of eyes and they can see. If the media must get hung up on where her skin tone falls within the color spectrum, Harris is not “black” but, as an Indian newspaper matrimonial ad might say, “wheatish” complexioned. As for her heritage, she can be and probably is gloriously eclectic.
Since she announced her run on the Martin Luther King Day, we might as well judge her not by the color of her skin but the content of her character.