Blog

Not Black enough? Not Asian enough? I’ve always wondered why Kamala Harris didn’t give her Asian-ness equal billing.

But now, thanks to an angry Donald Trump, none of us will ever forget the day that Trump made race and identity politics the seminal issue in the 2024 campaign.

Inflation? The economy? Nope. Trump has made it all about race.

“I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump asked at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention on Wednesday.

He did not stop there.

“I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn and she went—she became a Black person.”

It’s a false accounting, but that didn’t stop Trump.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black.”

All of that, of course, is a lie. Right up there with all his other big lies. How the 2020 election was stolen. Or how the system is rigged. Or how he is the greatest president for Blacks since Abraham Lincoln (a lie he also repeated in the Q&A session at NABJ).

But now he was falsely questioning Harris’ race. She has always identified as Black and went to Howard, the premier HBCU. Even Donald Trump, Jr., the key advisor who recently suggested his dad pick J.D. Vance as VP, made headlines in 2019 when he commented how Kamala was so Black, he didn’t realize Kamala was Indian.

So what was Trump doing now?

He was simply making it easy for voters in 2024. Trump was saying, instead of a Ka-MAH-la, wouldn’t you rather just vote for an aging white person who has no clue about race or diversity?

It’s the racist’s binary choice. When the going gets tough, the tough go racist.

This was Trump’s play at NABJ for all to see–Trumpian identity politics.

He knew what he was doing. He was combining all his failed attempts to label Harris, his flailing stabs against the woke DEI-sters, the radical left, and San Francisco liberals. It was a last-ditch appeal to stave off the demographically diverse future of a multiracial America, all in one bombastic episode.

Call it Trump’s last stand, perhaps like Custer at Little Big Horn, the key battle that led to the Native American victory in the Great Sioux War of 1876.

Using the cloak of ignorance, Trump was making 2024 about race, and just about race. For Trump, after all, it’s never about the real, but all about the “feels.” And when he said all those things about Harris, what better way to hit that racist chord deep in the hearts of voters, primarily white, everywhere.

That’s where we are now in this historic and consequential presidential race of 2024.

I predicted we’d get here eventually.

WHAT I WROTE FIVE YEARS AGO

As an ethnic journalist, I knew we would get to this point.Harris does have an issue about race. But it’s that she uses it strategically.

I’ve often wondered why she doesn’t give her Asian-ness equal billing.

This is what I wrote in 2019 on the AALDEF website:

As we’ve known in the nation’s most Asian American state, Harris is articulate, intelligent, and has always had the charisma of a star.

A female Obama type. Even Obama recognized that. And she’s like Obama in another way.

She’s of mixed race heritage.

She’s part African American, sure.

But she’s also a South Asian American, the daughter of an Indian woman who immigrated here from Madras in 1959.

With her parentage split between her immigrant father from Jamaica and her mother from India, Harris represents the real diversity of the New America.

She symbolizes all that is good about America, immigration, and equal opportunity. She rallies blacks and South Asians, who have been among the largest Democratic fundraisers in recent campaign cycles.

She’s the perfect counter to Trump, the president who relies on the loyalty of a mostly white base concerned about losing its grip on America.

So why did she keep the Asian part secret on a special Monday night CNN Town Hall in Iowa, which introduced her to the news channel’s viewers as a kick-off of the 2020 campaign?

The opportunity was there to blurt it out more than once.

The opening question was on race and how to make America safer for people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community given the current climate established by the Trump administration.

It was a kind of a softball for her to advocate talking openly and candidly about the issue.

“Racism is real in America,” she said. “Sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia. These things exist in America, and we have to speak truth that they do so that we can deal with them.”

Great.

So why no mention about her own Asian-ness at any point in the night?

She had another opportunity when she was asked about her background. She talked about opportunity and the dream of her parents.

Not her Indian mom.

A third time (not to be biblical), a proud Filipina immigrant, who identified herself as such, asked Harris to talk about the impact of her parents’ immigrant heritage. Again, no specifics about Harris’ Asian background, just the common ideals and values that her immigrant parents instilled in her.

I admit to being disappointed.

When was an Asian American given this kind of play at the beginning of a run for the American presidency?

As an Asian American of Filipino descent, a San Francisco native, and Californian, I was hoping Harris would recognize her Asian-ness fully.

During the CNN show she discussed being a first as a woman, African American, or person of color to be elected in her various posts as California attorney general and San Francisco District Attorney.

She never said Asian, South Asian, or Indian.

It made me wonder why she was being so homogenized when she has never backed down in California from acknowledging her Indian roots.

The website NewsIndiaTimes.com cited a Facebook post Harris wrote a few years back:

“I wanted to share one last story today for immigrant heritage month – my own. My mother, Shyamala Harris arrived at the University of California-Berkeley from India in 1959. She had dreams of becoming a scientist. The plan was to go back home when she finished school, but when she met my father Donald Harris, she made a different plan. She went against a practice reaching back thousands of years, and instead of an arranged marriage, chose a love marriage. This, an act of self-determination, made me and my sister Maya. And – like millions of the children of immigrants before and since – it made us Americans.”

It’s a touching story. Harris’ mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris died in 2009 at age 70 from cancer. She earned a Ph.D in nutrition and endocrinology at UC Berkeley, taught at universities around the world, and became known as an esteemed breast cancer researcher.

On Facebook, Harris shared pictures of her with her mother as an infant, and as a little girl.

On CNN, she didn’t mention Trump by name either, as I recall. He was only implied by his policy actions.

Yes, the issues matter. And Harris was on target advocating for Medicare For All, gun safety, and challenging corporate greed, to loud applause.

But Harris also is of Asian descent, and as a genuine contender for president of the United States, mentioning it means we all show up in a way we’ve never shown up before.

And instead of fanfare, there’s not even a peep.

Given that Trump is all about the sentiments of the new minority–whites, Harris represents the anti-Trump, racially. As I’ve said, she is the New America.

Was she fearful of Trump’s xenophobic base?

Maybe her handlers consider her race too polarizing, too soon. She did mention her mother by name in a recent New York Times op-ed on Medicare For All. In print, I suppose you don’t get the benefit of seeing Harris like on TV. So is the thought that on TV race is obvious, move on? You’ll recall Obama too had an issue early when talking about race. He hardly mentioned it. And we all kept waiting. Was it just so obvious race was irrelevant?

Maybe in the era of Trump’s neo-nativist, white nationalism, a political figure like Harris on the post-Obama national stage needs to use race politics differently, strategically.

Is she waiting for Trump to pull out a racist reference to match his “Pocahontas” name for Elizabeth Warren. And then go for it?

With Trump, it’s all going to be hard to avoid. He’s all about his anti-immigrant base. Will Trump unleash “Birther II” against Harris? Don’t rule it out.

But considering her credentials her smarts, and her empathy, Harris could be the wall that Trump can’t overcome.

No doubt, Harris’ Asian-ness puts us in a unique historical moment. A person with Asian blood in the White House? We’ve never been closer.

If she gains traction, who will the PRNBI (“Presumed Republican Nominee Barring Impeachment,” my new phrase for Trump) come back with to counter? Dump Pence for…..Nikki Haley?

It’s early on the road to 2020, but wouldn’t that be a sight, Asian women on opposite sides, so close to the top in American politics? And their Asian-ness just a footnote.

And perhaps that’s the way it should be.

——

AND HERE WE ARE TODAY

America is still puzzled by race. Or at least Donald Trump is. Harris has evolved too, invoking her mom asking, “Did you just fall from a coconut tree?”

Harris certainly is not inauthentic about her ethnicity. Strategic, perhaps. But she's not a race denier like Trump is an election denier.

And who knows, we may have a Haley-Harris cat fight yet. J.D. Vance, speaking at his own rally after the Trump NABJ appearance, didn’t comment on how Harris was Black or Indian enough, but rather questioned her time growing up in Canada.

Born in Oakland, but moved to Canada with her family because of her parents’ employment? Does Vance really think that is disqualifying?

Trump/Vance are desperate. It's gone beyond "Birther II." At every opportunity, it's just the all out "othering" of Ka-MAH-la.

We can only hope for a return to talking about inflation, the economy, jobs, and the future of America.

But maybe at least we can give Kamala’s race equal billing.

Since NABJ is a journalism organization, let’s hope all future stories in the mainstream won’t misidentify or half-identify Harris. Yesterday, I saw a TV commentator call her "Southeast Asian." No, it's South Asian, but better to use the more general "Asian American."

At the very least, we should expect to see no less than the full and correct historical identity phrase in stories about Harris. She is “Kamala Harris, the first Black woman and the first Asian American to serve as vice president.”

Until further notice, and subject to change when all the votes are counted.

###

NOTE: I will talk about this column and other matters on “Emil Amok’s Takeout,” my AAPI micro-talk show. Live @2p Pacific. Livestream on Facebook; my YouTube channel; and Twitter. Catch the recordings on www.amok.com.