https://t.co/NJuaJumx5R, https://t.co/DaaxpAmyoB
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) August 7, 2024
The “outrage” seems to be over Trump’s implication that Kamala Harris is using racial identity in an opportunistic manner. Which she probably is, making it a fair topic of discussion.
Let’s go back a few years to President Obama. His mother was white, his father was black. I never heard anyone refer to him as anything other than black.
Do you think it would have been silly if President Obama had identified as white? It would have been silly, right? But he had one white parent and one black parent, so if you can just pick the race of one parent and say “that’s what I am”, ignoring the race of the other parent, what difference does it make which one you pick?
To me, the only accurate description would be to say that he’s mixed-race, but mixed-race doesn’t get you 12 percent of the vote, so he was black.
My son is mixed-race. His mom is Asian. I’ve never heard anyone — including me, him, or his mom — refer to him as being white or Asian. I don’t think it would make sense. He’d have to erase one parent and half of his heritage. He’s mixed.
To the right is a picture of Kamala Harris’s parents. Her father is Jamaican, her mother is Indian. It’s hard to tell from one photo, but her father looks like a light-skinned black man. His skin color doesn’t look much different from his wife’s.
Is Kamala Harris now identifying as black and that’s it? That’s a rhetorical question because I don’t really know, but if she is, it does seem opportunistic to me, or at least open to question.