The Cultural History Behind Trump’s Attack on Kamala Harris’s Race

Just when it seemed that former President Donald J. Trump’s interview at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) conference couldn’t get any worse — Trump had already impugned the credibility and professionalism of the all-black panel of women journalists, whose conduct he described as “disgraceful” and whose questioning he called “nasty” — it did: Trump accused Kamala D. Harris of lying about her racial heritage. “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” said Trump, feigning perplexity. “I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black. … She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn and she went, she became a black person.” (I was on the edge of my seat waiting for him to call her Pocahontas, but the former president showed restraint.)

Not surprisingly, Trump’s slanderous claim electrified the left and embarrassed sane people on the right. Pundits asseverated, of course, but many others responded less solemnly. Within hours of the interview, for example, the hashtag #WhenITurnedBlack was trending on Twitter, prompting many black users (myself included) to post parodic origin stories of our doing something associated with black culture and consequently becoming black.

What does it mean to doubt the racial identity of a mixed-race woman who is among the most public and intensely vetted people in the world? The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser writes that we’ve seen exactly this tactic before — in the patently racist “birther” conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama that Trump and his votaries began during Obama’s first presidential run and still cling to today.

While it’s true that both Obama and Harris are of mixed racial heritage (although Obama’s non-black parent was white and Harris’s Indian), Trump’s charges against Harris are rooted in a specific cultural history: that of the feminizing of mixed-race identity in American culture.

Even in the pre–Civil War United States, when our greatest social distinction was between “free” and “not free” — before, to paraphrase W.E.B. Du Bois, the nation’s primary problem would become the problem of the color line — there were significant distinctions made among the enslaved based on their proximity to or distance from whiteness. Mixed-race women, for example, were more intensely feminized in the culture because of their perceived superior beauty, which made them more frequently the targets of white men’s lasciviousness. Studies such as the historian Jessica Marie Johnson’s Wicked Flesh — focusing on New Orleans, the capital of the antebellum sex-slave trade — have demonstrated the great peril to which these women’s hyperfeminization in the white imagination subjected them.

Although biracial women were, for obvious reasons, the first and most frequent victims of the feminization of mixed-race identity, they were not alone; biracial men faced it too, though it was weaponized against them to different ends. Some may recall the parodically feminized mixed-race character Adolph in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Laughable in his dandyism, Adolph is portrayed as contemptibly sycophantic toward white people and as lacking solidarity with his enslaved brethren. As I have shown at length elsewhere, in the Jim Crow era — whose racial binarism made race the foundational aspect of identity that it is today — biraciality would be further feminized as a metaphor for impotency and disorientation. In a world hardwired to think in black or white, to be neither is tantamount to being no one. As the ending of the famous mixed-race poet Langston Hughes’s “Cross” has it:

My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?

It’s important to remember that the offensive against Obama conspicuously did not emphasize his mixed-race heritage. His detractors sought to cast doubt not on his racial identity (as they did with Harris) but on his national identity, on where he was born. Fomenting skepticism about whether he was born in the United States would have obvious implications for his eligibility to run for president, and there were other rhetorical motives for this attack, to be sure. But the motive most relevant here is this important one: Playing up his Africanness linked him with precisely the kind of anti-immigrant fear that the right has been stoking at least since September 11. Since mixed-race identity has been historically feminized, attacking Obama through drawing attention to his mixed racial background would have run athwart of the xenophobic strategy they were pursuing. The particular variety of xenophobia mongered by the right relies on a hypermasculine stereotype of immigrants. How else could they be conceived of as “rapists” and “murderers”?

Harris is a woman, so this tack just wouldn’t work on her. Trump’s choice to exploit Harris’s mixed racial heritage is a means of imputing to her a threat of a different kind — one that is unmistakably feminine. Consider the right’s effort to undermine her fitness as commander in chief, as protector of the nation, seen in everything from the criticisms of her performance as “border czar” (an unfortunate term indeed) and in a cryptic July 11 post on X from the official account of the GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee, which read simply, “You’re not safe in Kamala Harris’s America.”

It’s illustrative here to remember President George W. Bush’s highly effective gambit in his 2004 campaign against John Kerry, then a senator, in which he characterized his opponent as a “flip flopper” — a feminizing jab seeking to establish, in the immediate wake of September 11, that Kerry lacked the gumption to defend the nation. If such a goofy insult as that could work against an established, rich white male senator (and decorated Vietnam veteran), just think of the potential damage to a mixed-race female candidate who is believed to be “flip flopping” on something so fundamental as her racial identity!

“Can this woman protect us?” is surely one question the right wants us to be asking about Harris. Another, more basic one is, “Can we trust her?” In typical fashion, Trump has not retreated from the embarrassing innuendo about the vice president’s race that he began with at the NABJ conference. After the interview he alleged on social media that “crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony. She uses everybody, including her racial identity!” This is exactly the kind of thing people have said throughout history about racial passers, especially in the late-19th- and early-20th centuries. Usually renouncing their black heritage for social advancement, racial passers were frequently denounced, charged by black people — as James Weldon Johnson memorably put it at the end of his Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) — for selling their “birthright for a mess of pottage,” and by white people for availing themselves of privileges to which they are not entitled. Trump’s smear campaign seeks to replay a version of this double jeopardy: He wants to make her mistrusted by white voters and alienate her from black ones.

It’s tempting to construe Trump’s efforts to impugn Harris’s racial identity as stemming from the much-discussed need for his campaign to define her — a need born of her late entry into the race after President Biden’s abrupt exit. In a country where race is a defining part of one’s identity, the argument might go, to cast someone as neither-nor would be, in effect, to void them. Recognizing the right’s neither-nor portrayal of Harris for what it is — a nullification of her existence — can prepare us to mount the correct defense: a repudiation of racial binarism altogether and an embrace of the entirety of her and other mixed-race people’s experiences.