Kamala Harris is Black. Kamala Harris is Asian American. We hold these truths to be self-evident, to the degree that even engaging with Donald Trump’s profoundly absurd claim that the vice president decided to “turn Black”—as if on a whim, for political points—feels like an exercise in futility.
But Donald Trump is running for president, and when he appeared on July 31 to speak at a panel held by the National Association of Black Journalists and suggested that Harris “happened to turn Black” a number of years ago, he was not doing so in a vacuum.
“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,” the former president said, on the record, in front of people. “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?
“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,” he continued, because no one on his campaign was there to clap a hand over his mouth. “I think somebody should look into that too.”
If I’ve learned anything from Trump’s ascent from reality TV star to president of the United States, it’s that his warped narratives are rooted in American oblivion that is stronger and more potent than we probably care to admit. If this guy can’t wrap his head around the idea of a single person being two (or more!) races, chances are he’s not the only one.
So it’s with a heavy sigh that I say, not for the first time in my life, that—drum roll, please—biracial people exist! And we come in all different shapes, sizes, colors, and combos. We are nightmare fuel for the conservative men crying “DEI hire!” wherever we go. But we are here!
For many of us biracial folks, our experience is rich—filled with joy and culture and love. But also, to be frank, sometimes it’s just annoying as hell. First there’s the never-ending barrage of “what are you?” and/or the constant disbelief that you are who you say you are. “You don’t look Japanese” is a response I received a lot as a kid when asked to explain my tanned skin and thick, curly hair. This comment was often followed by a list of other ethnicities which I might more easily pass for: Filipina. Mexican. Pacific Islander. At some point it just became easier for me to shrug my shoulders and show people a photo of my petite Japanese American mom.
It is particularly infuriating to be a biracial person who doesn’t necessarily “pass” as either of the races that make up their genetic code. If you are not phenotypically presenting as one race or the other, your experiences and your identity are often doubted, or explained away with qualifiers (“Oh, but she’s only half”). And to an extent, it’s true that biracial people’s lives will not always look similar to that of a person who passes as a member of a single race. For example, my mom will never understand what it was like when a white friend’s white dad made snide, racially charged comments about my family, assuming we were Mexican. And I will never understand what it was like to be a Japanese American in postwar Southern California, a child whose family was rebuilding after internment. Does that make either of us less Asian American? No. That just means that in 2024, the Asian American experience looks different than it did in John Hughes’s 1980s, which was apparently the decade in which Donald Trump formed all of his opinions about what a person can and cannot be.