Since Kamala Harris has become the Democratic candidate for president, her multiracial identity has returned to the news. Harris is the child of a Black Jamaican father and a South Asian mother. You can read that heritage as multiracial, as we are increasingly inclined to do now, but for most of American history, Harris would have been read more or less exclusively as Black. Vice-President Harris has explained that her mother knew this aspect of American race relations, and so she understood that Kamala and her sister Maya would be seen as Black girls and then as Black women. She is a Black woman, a graduate of Howard University. That said, she is Black with South Asian heritage, a multiracial presidential candidate in an increasingly multiracial world.
Harris’s interracial, interfaith family interests me because, like Harris, I am someone who is half-Indian. These experiences provide the basis of my book of personal essays, The Racism of People Who Love You: Essays on Mixed Race Belonging. I am mixed white and South Asian rather than Black and South Asian, but like Harris, I know what it is like to have my identity questioned or misunderstood because I am mixed. While I have never had a former president question my racial identity—in defiance of both my own personal identity and an entire history of American laws and attitudes about race—I write about my own experiences of having beloved white relatives put down my Indian heritage by disapprovingly asking if I am “super ethnic” when I wore Indian clothing around the house. I also wrote about Indian relatives pointing to my mixed heritage as to why I sometimes find Indian food too spicy or when I accidentally show respect like an American—perhaps by making, rather than avoiding, eye contact.
More importantly, since writing The Racism of People Who Love You, I have heard from any number of mixed-race people who have shared their experiences of moving through the world with multiple cultural heritages and racial identities. People have written to me about belonging to two worlds, but never fully belonging to either. They have written about feeling deeply part of a world, but then having others question whether they were “authentic” enough. They have talked about the ways in which having mixed cultural heritages makes you better at moving between cultures, and the ways it can put you in a place where you have to code switch for absolutely everyone. While people wrote about many experiences, some of which I share, and some I do not, one thing that we all seemed to have in common, and in common with the public response to Harris is: however comfortable or uncomfortable we feel with our multiple heritages, the fact that we are more than one thing confuses other people who sometimes reject the reality of our pluralistic backgrounds.
It is surprising and unfortunate that so many people find multiracial heritage confusing, because a growing number of Americans identify as mixed race. In 2020, 33.8 million Americans identified as multiracial—a notable jump from 2010 when 9 million Americans claimed multiracial identity. That jump probably partly reflects a real jump in the number of people who are mixed race because more and more people are marrying across racial lines, and having mixed race children. But it also represents more people claiming their mixedness instead of choosing one racial identity on forms.
Despite the growing number of mixed-race people, it never occurred to me, as a mixed-race person, that I would see myself in the political life of the nation. Then, Barack Obama, a Black man with a white mother, became president. Still, it wasn’t until Harris that I saw myself. Even then, I was annoyed when people seemed to think I would be excited to see a half-South Asian person in office. Harris’s politics are not as progressive as I would like, and I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 primary.
Later, a friend shared a video of Kamala Harris and Mindy Kaling making dosa together. Dosa are not a traditional food for me. Dosa are from the south of India, as are Harris and Kaling’s families. My family is from the north. But I loved their chat about Indians storing spices in Taster’s Choice containers (not something we did either) and was starting to warm up to Harris when it became clear that she had never made dosa.
I also loved that Kaling treated Harris as a fellow Indian American. There was no implication that, somehow, because Harris is Black, she could not also be Indian. One sensed that, in this moment, Harris was allowed to be fully both, fully herself, even if it was the Indian part of things that was being fronted. This was underscored for me when Kaling’s dad joined them in the kitchen, and Harris, like a good Indian of a younger generation, addressed Mr. Kaling as uncle, and Mr. Kaling, like a good Indian “uncle,” treated her as something of an honorary niece. In that moment, I was sold.
Representation matters, and whether or not we precisely share politics, there is a way that Harris represents me.
About the Author
Samira K. Mehta is an associate professor of women and gender studies and of Jewish studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Blended Family in America, was a National Jewish book award finalist. Mehta’s current academic book project, God Bless the Pill: Sexuality and Contraception in Tri-Faith America is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press. Connect with her online at samiramehta.com and on Twitter @samirakmehta.
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