For Sonia Smith Kang, it hasn’t come as a surprise that Kamala Harris’s ethnic background has been challenged by her opponent and other members of the Republican party. “It’s what mixed folks have been dealing with for a long time,” said Smith Kang, who is both Mexican and Black and is married to a Korean man.
Since Donald Trump’s false attacks on the racial identity of Kamala Harris at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention last month, he has purposely mispronounced her name, posted a photo of her in a traditional Indian sari and employed supporters to claim that the Democratic presidential candidate is not Black. For mixed-race voters who heard Trump state that Harris “happened to turn Black”, feelings of anger, frustration and annoyance instantly arose.
Related: The evolution of Kamala Harris: from activist in pigtails to presidential candidate
“Everyone thinks we’re in this post-racial time, but Trump proved why classes and courses still need to be taught,” Kang said.
When the landmark case Loving v Virginia overturned state laws that restricted interracial marriage in the US in 1967, just 3% of marriages were interracial. By 2019, that number grew to 11%. Today, about one in 10 Americans – 33.8 million people – identify as mixed race.
The rapid rise of multiracial people could not only affect the 2024 election, but reshape American electoral politics since mixed-race people tend to be young and the country’s white population is ageing. The Guardian spoke to numerous biracial and multiracial Americans who see their own stories in Harris and believe her mixed heritage gives her a political advantage.
Smith Kang, the founder of the multicultural children’s apparel line Mixed Up Clothing and the vice-president of the non-profit advocacy group Multiracial Americans of Southern California is organizing a national call later this month to galvanize the mixed-race community to support Harris. “We’re really excited to mobilize and show up for her,” said the San Fernando Valley resident.
After Barack Obama, Harris is the second-ever presidential nominee of a major political party to identify as biracial or mixed race. The daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father, Harris has long embraced her south Asian and Black ethnic background. As her popularity has shot up in recent weeks, the topic of multiracial identity has been thrust into the spotlight.
“I had to reread Trump’s quotes and the first things I felt were shock and also anger and defensiveness of Kamala Harris,” said Charlee Thompson, who lives in Seattle and works on clean energy and climate policy. “The fact that mixed identity is in the mainstream media on this political stage is shocking to me.”
Thompson, who has a Japanese mother from Hawaii and a Mexican and white father, said multiracial people like herself and Harris were still treated as different or exotic even in 2024. “In the last month, I had three different people in completely different situations ask me or guess what I was,” she said. “I think light needs to be shed on the fact that multiracial people exist and how people respond can be othering or make people feel like they don’t belong in the community they belong to.”
Dr Jenn Noble, a psychologist and educator who coaches parents of mixed-race kids, believes something more sinister than ignorance is going on when it comes to Trump questioning Harris’s identity. “He’s doing something a lot of people accuse mixed-race people of, which is being deceitful or somehow playing their background in a way that benefits them or suits them when it fits them,” she said.
Los Angeles-based Noble, who is of Black and Sri Lankan heritage, said research shows there are benefits to being mixed race such as cognitive flexibility, which allows for people who are exposed to multiple languages or cultures to switch between groups easily, which could benefit the vice-president during her run. “I think Harris would have quite a bit of the skills to see the needs of varying groups and meet them in a way that works for that group,” she said.
After Trump received widespread criticism for his remarks about Harris, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, defended the former president’s comments, saying Harris was “fundamentally a fake person” and “chameleon-like”. Vance has biracial children with his Indian American wife, Usha. (Vance recently told CNN he believed Harris was “whatever she says she is”.)
Academics and mental health professionals have said they worry about the implications of Trump’s comments, as “identity denial” – telling someone they are not what they actually are – is a common stressor for mixed-race Americans. Historically in the US, the one-drop rule asserted that anyone with a Black ancestor was considered Black and even today, multiracial people are often spoken about in fractions rather than using words like “both” or “and”.
The 2020 US Census made it easier for multiracial people to identify themselves, which led to an increase in population and a more accurate portrait of a racially diverse country. According to a recent New York Times analysis, the number of Americans who identify as both Black and Asian has tripled over the last 15 years to more than 600,000 – and about 20% of them live in Harris’s home state of California.
For David Chetlain, a resident of Newberg, Oregon, who was born to a white American mother and a Black father from Ghana and adopted by a Native American mother and white father, Trump’s recent remarks made him recall the times strangers interrogated his own appearance, making comments such as: “Where did you come from?” and asking his mother: “Did the milkman pay you a visit?”
“When people do that it’s to demean you or put you in a box,” said Chetlain, a navy veteran who works in software sales. “People try to make you feel less of an American.” What Chetlain has learned so far about Harris and her late mother, a breast cancer researcher, and father, a prominent economist, impressed him.
“They are the American Dream,” said Chetlain of Harris and her immigrant parents. “That’s a true meritocracy. Nobody gave [Harris] $400m to start a career of fraud and tax evasion.”
