What a mixed-race presidential candidate means for America’s diversity

Kamala Harris’ entry into the US Presidential race has dramatically changed the nature of the country’s election.

The overwhelming narrative is that she has re-energised the Democratic campaign and managed to shift the tone and assumptions in this election in ways that have significantly destabilised both Republican strategies and the polls.

Although her age and relative newness (compared to Biden at least) are often cited as the cause of this shift, it is her complex racial and cultural identity that has received most attention.

This is no longer a contest between ‘two old white men’, and the implications for American politics and identity could not be more profound.  

Harris is the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan (her mother) and Donald J. Harris (her father). Her mother is of Indian origin, she migrated to the US as an adult to attend graduate school.

Her father is Afro-Jamaican, similarly arriving in the US to attend University. So, Harris has both black and South Asian ancestry, and a strong experience of recent migration in her family.

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This makes her both like and very different from her most direct comparator, former US President Barack Obama, whose parents were of (white) American and Kenyan descent.

While Obama also had a mixed-race heritage and experience of migration, he was always firmly considered a ‘Black’ candidate and president.

Despite this difference, many of the racial politics and obstacles remain the same for Harris. Her background and identity have sustained similar attacks.

Interestingly, her responses and the reception of those attacks are landing very differently in the America of 2024, compared to the US of 2008 and 2012.

And the stakes are high.

How Harris navigates these narratives and how successful she is at doing this will have significant implications for the future of race, multi-racialism, immigration and diversity in America.

New tactics or the same divisive playbook?

Racial attacks on Presidential candidates are not unusual.

Obama, notably, was the subject of the “birtherism” conspiracy, a false claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. It circulated during both his 2008 and 2012 campaigns (and his presidency) to such an extent that he released an official version of his birth certificate.

These attacks, and their strategic use by Republicans in general and Trump especially, resemble the sexism and misogyny underlying a lot of the criticisms made against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Presidential campaign.

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And the Republicans seem to be re-using these tactics that were at least partially successful.

Despite being born in California, there are persistent online claims that Harris is ineligible to run for office as she is not a “natural born citizen”. This false claim rests on a mistaken reading of the US constitution as requiring a citizen to have American parents at the time of birth to be eligible.

And, following President Biden’s endorsement of Harris, there was a flurry of online posts suggesting she was a “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion) candidate, only selected for her ethnicity and gender.

This view has even been repeated by US Republican Representatives Tim Burchett and Harriet Hageman, with the latter claiming that Harris is “intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel”.

But it is Trump, unsurprisingly, who has led the attack on her mixed-race heritage.

In July this year, at the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago, Trump commented: “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. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

This attempt to question and undermine Harris’ identity, to divide a candidate along the lines of mixed races is a disturbing new trend that other candidates haven’t yet faced.

It raises the question: is this a new tactic for attacking mixed-race public figures? Or simply a new iteration of the same divisive playbook? And how effective will it be against Harris in a country with an increasingly mixed population?

Mixed-race people are exactly that. Mixed.

While Harris has faced a variety of racial and sexist attacks, she has only  engaged her racial and cultural identities in response to these attacks, otherwise generally ignoring her gender as a political identity.

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She has focused on her mixed heritage and how it contributed to her overall identity. During the Democratic National Convention, she appealed to her mixed background and diverse experience.

In her 2020 autobiography, The Truths We Hold, Harris explains that while she and her sister were mainly raised by her mother after her parents separated, her mother was always very aware that they would be seen in the US as Black and was “determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”

This seemingly worked as Harris would go on to attend Howard University, a traditionally Black university and join one of its Black sororities – bulwarks of African-American social justice movements in the US.

Equally, she has consistently referred to her South Asian heritage, her mother’s immigrant experience and her connections to family in Chennai, southern India.

Finally, all of this is reflected in the wide outreach she is doing to all these groups.

But, there is a deep difficulty here.

Some polls have found that Harris is polling far higher with Black Americans (around 77 per cent) compared to Asian Americans (62 per cent). The second category is quite diverse itself, encompassing a huge variety of linguistic and racial groups.

On top of this, Kamala’s diversity defies even progressive narratives and assumptions about what a ‘diverse’ president is like.

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US media, literature, entertainment and art have, since the mid-20th century, been imagining different sorts of Presidents, but these  typically fit into only one metric of diversity (principally they were either a white woman or black male).

The choice Democrats faced between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama in 2008 typified this assumption.

But an increasing proportion of Americans identify as multi-racial, more than 33 million based on a recent survey. But how to appeal to these voters in a way that translates into support differs from traditional identity politics where there is a clear community (e.g. the African American Community) and set of linked interests (e.g. racial justice).

Mixed-race people are exactly that. Mixed. Their mixes differ and their relations to these identities and communities are diverse.

The immigrant experience is a longstanding part of many American stories. But in some ways Harris’ story is different. She is the second-generation daughter of two professionals from different communities who met in the US.

Unlike previous waves of migration to Western states, contemporary migration to the US includes a body of highly educated professionals. Often with international educations and career profiles.

These migrants have had cosmopolitan experiences and, as a result, values. They have complex relations to their cultural and racial heritage, which are often diverse, nuanced and less easy to use to mobilise groups

Harris’ strategy so far has been to show what she values while pointing out the tired, repetitive nature of the attacks. Harris called Trump’s comments "the same old show", a simple strategy focused on "divisiveness and disrespect."

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So far, that seems to be working.

But it raises larger questions about the future of this type of politics in an increasingly diverse world where we don’t just have “women” or “Black” or “Indian” or “immigrant” candidates.

We have all of those bound up in one complex person.

And as we’re seeing in this US presidential election campaign, this generates new hostilities and new visions for the future – all in one moment.