What would a mixed-race president mean for the U.S.?
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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.

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's 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? She is always,

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. The relationship between Black and South Asian communities in the United States goes back over 100 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 shipworkers, settling in New Orleans or New York. But the U.S. was not a very hospitable place for these new immigrants. Both the peddlers and the shipworkers were coming to the United States at a time when the country was deeply 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 U.S. communities of color. They were Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. That's historian and author Vivek Bald. He's the co-director of a PBS documentary called In Search of Bengali Harlem. It's all about the lost histories of the South Asian diaspora in the United States. They started marrying within those communities. They had children within those communities.

So those children who are, you know, Indian or Bengali on one side and African-American or Creole on the other side. And over the generations, you know, their descendants have remained part of those communities and others. So in the present day, you have fourth and fifth and sixth generation descendants of those Indian peddlers.

Today, in 2024, the number of people with more than one racial background in the U.S. has grown a lot. In the last census, 10% identified as multiracial. Natasha 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 United States has been pretty stagnant over time. So in the United States, we generally operate along the

the logic of monoracialism 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, but we still operate under the understanding that people have one racial identity. So when there's somebody who identifies or talks about family members who have multiple racial backgrounds, people believe that you have to still choose one.

Consider this. The United States has never seen a multiracial presidential candidate like Kamala Harris, Black and South Asian. But she's certainly not alone in that American racial identity. Coming up, we hear from three people with similar backgrounds about what it means to be both South Asian and Black in this moment. From NPR, I'm Asma Khalid.

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It's

It's Consider This from NPR. Race is never far from the conversation in American politics. And that's been the case with the 2024 presidential election and the historic candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, who has Indian and Jamaican heritage.

I wanted to get a sense of how people with similar racial identities to Harris feel about her candidacy and the conversations around her identity. And that's how I met Jaya Krishnan. She's 23, 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.

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...

Jalika Ali was born in New York City. She's also South Asian and black, now age 65, and goes by the nickname Jolly. And she says on the day she was born, there wasn't even an option on her birth certificate for her father's race. You know, I'm from the days where my birth certificate says my mom's Negro, but my birth certificate says my father's white.

But right underneath, where is he from? And they wrote 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 had more African-American features, I'd say, than I did. It was a little darker skin and thicker hair. It was always kind of looked at as, you know, those things.

not pure kids, if you will. Like, we were mixed and to some degree, you know, were treated that way. The way he was treated led to complicated feelings about his identity. I was, I guess you could say, a little bit... Ashamed is not a good word, but just...

shy to state my Indian heritage and because I had a weird name too, and no one could say it right. And for basically from eighth grade to graduation, I changed my name.

I gave myself the name Mark. Jaya, Hardeep, and Jolly joined me via Zoom recently. All three of them say they're voting for Harris. And I wanted to know how they felt about the way Harris has navigated talking about her identity throughout her campaign. An identity that they share. She has to go the extra mile. She has to prove herself.

to so many different people who can't understand that there could be a mixed...

family, a mixed relations that actually work. She's holding her own. It's very hard. It's like very hard to know what group you're in front of. What do they know already? How do they already perceive you? Do they just see you as a race or can they see you as a formidable candidate? I mean, I didn't really think about like how much she was kind of talking about her racial identity until like the other candidate brought it up.

I mean, she does come from two very different cultures, but she has the right to identify with both. And I think that she's been doing a good job of...

being a part of both. I think it's also important for her to, you know, put out her identity to the population and to say, look, I come from multiple ethnic backgrounds. We're all Americans. I don't see it as a black and white issue. This is an economic issue. Do you think

that the vice president has an obligation to talk about her racial identity? I think it's being forced on her to talk about it. I don't know that she has an obligation. I mean, you look at her, you either think she's Indian or you think she's Black or you don't care, then, you know, it's too bad she has to even address this. I mean, this is about being president is being president for everybody. It isn't like I'm the white president for America or I'm the Black president for America. So it's really more about...

you know, your character, what you're standing behind, what's the plan for your country. And yeah, I don't, I don't think that she's obligated to really go into that, but, um, you know, as we spoke about Harris's Indian and Jamaican heritage, one big theme that came up repeatedly was former president Trump's comment that the vice president only recently began identifying as black, which by the way is untrue. I asked each of them what went through their minds when they heard his comments. Well,

Well, as I said before, he's uninformed. Should have been something he knew about. His comments were...

like rude and hurtful, especially as someone who's heard them before, like throughout my life. So I guess like when he said that, it kind of made me realize how much things aren't changing as much as I thought they were. Because when I went to college, it seemed like everyone was more accepting of the fact that I was both. But hearing him say that makes me feel like

Like I've gone back like to, you know, elementary school or middle school where I would get kind of like made fun of or just rude remarks for just being from two very different cultures. Do you feel like the country, the politics, the cultural moment is different now in the year 2024 leading up to this November's election than the conversations we were having in, say, October, November of 2008?

Yeah, I would say that it's, you know, it depends on where you are in the country, obviously. Um, but the country is becoming more heterogeneous, you know, as we see immigration coming through and all, you know, all different people of different cultures entering into, you know, communities that before maybe were more isolated. I would say that, um,

I see a lot less racism in younger people. I see a lot more interracial dating. I was excited when Obama was elected. I thought, oh, the tide has turned. It's turning. But Trump's rhetoric and what he's fashioned has brought us back quite a bit. And Jaya, what about you? I mean, what does it mean for you to be both Black and South Asian now, in this moment, in 2024? I mean...

I think that especially with the vice president running at this moment, it's a good time to kind of reflect back on my own identity. The ingrained racism within America, it still like definitely exists because people constantly make ignorant comments or there's still microaggressions out there for people from mixed backgrounds, even though it's not as bad as in the 60s or the 80s. I mean, it...

It's really cool for me to be a woman and to be Black and South Indian and have Kamala running for president. Jalika Ali, Hardeep Reddick, and Jaya Krishnan, thank you all very much for your time. I really do appreciate it. Thank you so much. God bless. Thank you, Asma.

This episode was produced by Catherine Fink. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. And one more thing before we go, you can now enjoy the Consider This newsletter. We still help you break down a major story of the day, but you'll also get to know our producers and hosts and some moments of joy from the All Things Considered team. You can sign up at npr.org slash consider this newsletter. ♪

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Asma Khalid.

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