Mixed Race People Outraged by Trump’s Comments on Kamala

Clinical psychologist Jennifer Noble said she was “annoyed, to say the least” when she saw former President Donald Trump question Vice President Kamala Harris’ ethnic background earlier this week.

Noble, who specializes in helping parents of mixed-race children and is Black and Sri Lankan, said she knew Trump was making a political calculation when he said Harris was merely “promoting” her Indian heritage and “just happened to be Black” for political convenience.

“Because it was a National Association of Black Journalists conference, I think he thought it would endear him to the audience,” Noble said. “By saying that she just happened to be black, he was hoping the audience would reject the connection between her and blackness.”

Harris has never denied that she is biracial. The politician is an immigrant born to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, and graduated from Howard University, a historically black college.

But when Trump claimed Harris was not black, Reuters described the audience of about 1,000 as “some booing.”

“He obviously didn’t do his homework,” Noble told HuffPost. “But he’s an exaggerated example of what’s happening to a lot of people. I’ve seen people in social media comments, in news outlets, and in my social circle calling the vice president a black man. or Indian. She is rarely mentioned. both or and.”

By publicly questioning the Vice President’s racial background, Trump perpetuated common expectations that mixed-race people face.You can’t do both.

“I’ve definitely been asked or been asked to take sides,” Noble said. “I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had since I revealed my Sri Lankan and African-American background. ‘Oh, I get it, but you know you’re black, right? That’s it. ‘You’re black.’ I feel like my Sri Lankan heritage is being erased or denied.”

In the United States, anyone with even one black ancestor has long been classified as black due to the historical legacy of the “one drop rule.” Today, many mixed race people are judged as “not enough” for one ethnicity or another, sometimes even within their own ethnic community.

Despite the growing number of people in the United States who identify as two or more races—the multiracial population in the United States grew 276% between 2010 and 2020, from 9 million to 33.8 million, or 10.2% of the population—we still don’t know how to talk about multiracial experiences.

Mixed race people who identify as both races sometimes feel confused or lost about who they are, Noble said. (This belief reflects the “tragic mixed race” archetype, the idea that mixed race people are naturally depressed or even suicidal because they don’t fit into one category.)

Sometimes mixed race people are seen as frauds and manipulative people because they define themselves in multiple ways, Noble said. “They try to ‘use’ their backgrounds to their advantage in some way, as we saw in the Harris case.”

A 2018 Rutgers University study found that white people viewed mixed-race people as less trustworthy when they changed their racial expressions in different situations.

Noble said this delegitimization of multiracial identities flattens the lived experiences of mixed-race people and can make them feel “unsafe to connect and find belonging within their own cultural group.”

Trump’s vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, has mixed-race children. The Ohio senator is white and his wife, Usha, is of Indian descent. Nevertheless, Vance defended his running mate’s divisive rhetoric, saying Trump had noted Harris’s “essential chameleon nature.”

According to Sarah E. Gaither, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, this type of characterization can have negative consequences for the mental health of mixed-race people.

“Identity denial — for example, saying you’re not black when you really are — is one of the most common stressors that mixed-race Americans report experiencing,” Gaither told HuffPost.

A 2019 study published in the journal Psychological Issues found that when researchers disavowed one of their identities, it took mixed-race Americans longer for their cortisol levels to return to baseline.

Gaither, who is of mixed black and white descent, is often perceived as white, and she has experienced quite a bit of people denying her black heritage. As a child, some even questioned whether her father was really related to her because of her skin color.

“I’ll always remember when I was a kid walking down the mall and someone came up to me and asked if I knew the man holding my hand (it was my father, of course), because they thought he was kidnapping me,” she said.

Gaither said encounters like this one serve as a reminder of how entrenched our country’s thinking is when it comes to race.

“The problem is that race is socially constructed, which means we have an opportunity to reconfigure what race means and what racial groups and identities are acceptable,” she said.

In the 2010s, Trump helped spread the “natalist” conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that former President Barack Obama was not actually born in the United States. Now, others in the Trump campaign are parroting his fictional story about Harris.

At a rally in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, Alina Harbar, a former Trump lawyer and current campaign supporter, also described Harris as a racial harasser.

“I’ll tell you, Ms. Harris,” she told the audience. “I’m a strong woman, I’m a mother, I’m a lawyer, I’m an American. And unlike Ms. Kamala, I know who my roots are, I know where I come from, and I don’t play with the Constitution.”

Analia Albuza, a psychology professor at Northeastern University who studies multiracial identities, is concerned about the implications of Trump’s “going black” remarks.

Recent history shows that Trump’s campaign message is persuasive. Bicultural Albuja points to a 2018 study that found that prejudice against groups Trump targeted in the 2016 election—particularly immigrants and Muslims—was seen as more acceptable after the election, but not against groups he didn’t target.

“I worry that if this kind of negativity and questioning of Harris’s identity continues, it will become more acceptable to question the identity of a mixed race person,” Albuja told HuffPost.

“Instead, I hope this (election) will help people become aware of mixed race people and normalize identities for diverse groups,” she said.

Ayumi Matsuda-Ribero, a PhD student at the University of California, San Diego, isn’t surprised that Harris’ mixed-race identity has become a topic of conversation in an era when competition is fierce.

“I knew it was going to happen as soon as she was announced as the Democratic nominee, but I didn’t expect something so outrageous to come out of it,” she said.

In her own experience as a Venezuelan-Japanese American, Matsuda-Ribero said she has never been asked to “pick a side” because others usually pick their own.

“For example, I went to a predominantly white high school. When I was in high school, my white classmates would say, ‘Hespanic,’ if I was struggling in class. But if I did well or got good grades, it was because I was Asian,” she told HuffPost.

For years, Matsuda-Ribero has tried to explain her mixed-race identity to people who struggle with it, but she says it’s exhausting. She doesn’t want to explain where her parents are from, because that inevitably raises questions about how they met, and then why they were in the U.S., and why she is now.

“Sometimes that was the only way people would ‘get it,’ but that required a willingness to reveal my personal history to people I didn’t know, and that wasn’t something that should have been expected of me,” she said.

Matsuda-Ribero ultimately said mixed-race people have no obligation to explain their identity to others.

“To borrow from Maria PP Root’s ‘Bill of Rights for Mixed Cultures,’ we have the right not to be held responsible for the discomfort that our physical, ethnic, or racial ambiguities cause others,” Matsuda-Ribero said.

“We have the right to express our mixed race identity in any way we want, because there is no ‘right way’ to be mixed race,” she added.