When Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic party’s nomination back in August, she began her speech by paying tribute to her parents:
“So, my mother was 19 when she crossed the world alone, traveling from India to California with an unshakable dream to be the scientist who would cure breast cancer,” she said.
“When she finished school, she was supposed to return home to a traditional arranged marriage. But as fate would have it, she met my father, Donald Harris, a student from Jamaica. They fell in love and got married, and that act of self-determination made my sister, Maya, and me.”
Harris’ multiracial identity has not been a major focal point during her short campaign.
But it has made headlines – involving her opponent. This summer, former president Donald Trump was interviewed at a National Association of Black Journalists convention, and said this about Harris:
“She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t 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. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
Harris’ Black and South-Asian roots are a first for the top of a presidential ticket – but she’s certainly not the only person to embody that heritage.
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A historic relationship.
The relationship between Black and South-Asian communities in the U.S. goes back over a hundred years, to the late 1800s, when immigrants from British colonial India arrived in America.
Many of these young men took on jobs as peddlers or ship workers, settling in New Orleans or New York. But the U.S. wasn’t a very hospitable place for the new immigrants.
“Both the peddlers and the ship workers were coming to the United States at a time when the country was deeply segregated,” historian and author Vivek Bald told NPR. Bald is the co-director of a PBS documentary called “In Search of Bengali Harlem,” which is all about the lost histories of the South-Asian diaspora in the U.S.
“You know, [the country was segregated] through Jim Crow in the south, but also northern cities were equally segregated. And the places where they found sanctuary and the possibility of building new lives were other communities where you see communities of color. They were Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods.”
Bald explains that marriages between the communities started becoming more and more commonplace, with fourth and fifth generation descendants of those Indian peddlers still living in the U.S. to this day.
Today, in 2024, the number of people with more than one racial background in the U.S. has grown significantly.
In the last census, 10% identified as multiracial. Nitasha Tamar Sharma is a professor of Black studies and Asian-American studies at Northwestern University. She says despite this population growth, the way we understand race in the U.S. has been pretty stagnant over time.
“In the United States, we generally operate along the logic of mono racialism or the presumption that people in the United States identify with one racial category. Those categories have changed over time, as we see on the census, which should tell Americans that race is a fiction.”
Sharma says that because there is this assumption of just one racial identity, Americans have a social tendency to believe each individual needs to choose one over the other.
Real life representation.
Jaya Krishnan is a 23-year-old from the Bay Area, and identifies as South Indian and Black.
“Growing up, especially in a predominantly white environment or like just any environment, for some reason, I felt like people couldn’t grasp the fact that I was both South Indian and black,” she told NPR’s Asma Khalid.
Jaya says even some friends struggled to understand – or embrace – her mixed-race identity.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, well, you’re Black because of your hair. Or I see your mom, your mom’s Black, you’re Black. And then my South Indian friends would be like, Well, you hang out with us, so.”
Many decades earlier, in 1959, Jolikha Ali was born in New York City. She’s also South-Asian and Black, now age 65, and goes by the nickname Jolly. She says on the day she was born, there wasn’t even an option on her birth certificate for her father’s race.
“I’m from the days where my birth certificate says my mom’s Negro, but my birth certificate says my father’s white. [He’s from] Pakistan.”
Like Jaya and Jolly, 52-year-old Hardeep Reddick, who grew up in Baltimore, didn’t feel completely seen growing up.
“We were always kind of looked at, my sister and myself, especially my sister, [who] had more African-American features than I did. Darker skin and thicker hair was always kind of looked at as, you know, those not pure kids, if you will, like we were mixed and to some degree, you know, were treated that way.”
Jaya, Hardeep, and Jolly joined Asma in conversation to share their thoughts on how Harris has navigated talking about her identity throughout her campaign – an identity that they share.
Jaya Krishnan is a 23-year-old from the Bay Area, and identifies as South Indian and Black.
“Growing up, especially in a predominantly white environment or like just any environment, for some reason, I felt like people couldn’t grasp the fact that I was both South Indian and black,” she told NPR’s Asma Khalid.
Jaya says even some friends struggled to understand – or embrace – her mixed-race identity.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, well, you’re Black because of your hair. Or I see your mom, your mom’s Black, you’re Black. And then my South Indian friends would be like, Well, you hang out with us, so.”
Many decades earlier, in 1959, Jolikha Ali was born in New York City. She’s also South-Asian and Black, now age 65, and goes by the nickname Jolly. She says on the day she was born, there wasn’t even an option on her birth certificate for her father’s race.
“I’m from the days where my birth certificate says my mom’s Negro, but my birth certificate says my father’s white. [He’s from] Pakistan.”
Like Jaya and Jolly, 52-year-old Hardeep Reddick, who grew up in Baltimore, didn’t feel completely seen growing up.
“We were always kind of looked at, my sister and myself, especially my sister, [who] had more African-American features than I did. Darker skin and thicker hair was always kind of looked at as, you know, those not pure kids, if you will, like we were mixed and to some degree, you know, were treated that way.”
Jaya, Hardeep, and Jolly joined Asma in conversation to share their thoughts on how Harris has navigated talking about her identity throughout her campaign – an identity that they share.
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