Racial deja vu all over again on the campaign trail
Race and citizenship have become the two most combustible elements of our presidential race. For the last four presidential election cycles, one or an arcane combination of both have dogged Democratic and Republican presidential candidates during their primaries and general elections.
In 2008, Sen. John McCain, RAriz., faced questions about whether his birth in the Panama Canal Zone, which had been built and controlled by America, disqualified his claim to be a natural-born citizen, thus making him ineligible to hold presidential office.
Questions about then Sen. Barack Obama’s citizenship and place of birth became a cottage industry for right-wing hacks determined to prove he was born in Kenya and trained by Mau Mau revolutionaries to be an anti-colonial sleeper agent in a plot to ascend the American presidency.
Donald Trump was America’s most prominent “birther” at the time, but he disingenuously blamed Hillary Clinton for raising the issue when her campaign gathered opposition research on Mr. Obama when they were Democratic primary opponents.
In 2016, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who was born in Canada to American parents, faced Mr. Trump in the Republican primaries and got the full birther treatment with a side order of Trumpian scaremongering that his father, a Cuban immigrant, had participated in the assassination of JFK.
Mr. Obama was elected America’s 44th president despite birther hysteria stoked by racism, xenophobia and willful ignorance by low-information voters easily swayed by absurdist propaganda.
As the country celebrated the most unlikely election in American history, white conservatives initially felt left out and opened a new front in the culture wars: President-elect Barack Obama’s claim to be “Black” was hurtful because it erased his white Kansas mother’s legacy. His refusal to self-identify as biracial “dishonored” both parents, neither of whom had any connection to
Black America by blood or soil.
Since his African father didn’t raise him, Mr. Obama was “culturally white” they argued, which “explained” his appeal to white voters even though he lost the white vote overwhelmingly to Mr. McCain.
The strange attempt at raising the flag of “whiteness” on the beach of Mr. Obama’s self-identified blackness was short-lived once he began to govern. Soon, the interest in claiming him as “half white” gave way to unrelenting hatred reserved for Blacks with no white pedigree. After that, Barack Obama was unambiguously Black — and good riddance!
The birther attacks resumed under Donald Trump, who demanded to see everything from Mr. Obama’s birth certificate to his academic records since “no one” remembered interacting with him at the two Ivy League universities he attended.
Now Sen. Kamala Harris, DCalif., Sen. Joe Biden’s pick to be his vice president, is undergoing the 2020 version of “show me your papers.”
In a much derided opinion piece in Newsweek, law professor John Eastman questioned Ms. Harris’ constitutional eligibility to be vice president and, eventually, president based on a novel definition of “natural-born citizen” and the 14th Amendment as applied to the Oakland, Calif.born candidate.
Because Ms. Harris’ Indianborn mother and Jamaican-born father allegedly weren’t full American citizens when they got married and gave birth to her — and the fact she attended high school in Montreal — makes her provenance as an American citizen questionable.
Because that argument can be quickly dismantled by even the sleepiest law student at the country’s worst law school, conservatives are already pivoting to a more racially essentialist-oriented argument to discredit her: Kamala Harris isn’t “legally” Black. This argument depends on a fixed definition of American Blackness as being rooted in a provable lineage from slavery through Jim Crow to marginalization in “urban America” today. Obviously, Jamaicans will find such hair-splitting as hilarious as Indians fleeing the Indian caste system.
Ms. Harris’ self-identification as Black doesn’t dishonor either her Jamaican or East Asian/Indian roots. It is an honest acknowledgement of how America’s own complex racial caste system has treated her since she was a child growing up in California.
The conservatives who insist that she’s trying to pull a fast one similar to what Mr. Obama allegedly did claim that since she was raised by her Indian-American mother (partly in Canada after her parents divorced), then she is somehow morally obligated to check the brown or Asian box and not the Black box since none of her forebears ever toiled on an American plantation, though her Jamaican ancestors might make a quick rejoinder or two to that silly distinction.
When it comes to the taxonomy of race, right-wing conservative pundits and intellectuals have that covered. After all, it was the white political hierarchy in America that created pseudo-scientific categories like octoroons, quadroons, etc., to contrast with the “purity of whiteness.”
For her part, Ms. Harris, a proud graduate of a historically Black university and a member of one of the largest Black sororities in the country, has always identified herself as Black, but in recent years has made pains to claim her Asian roots as well. Sometimes, she’s content to simply identify herself as “American,” trusting that people are becoming smart enough to realize that most Americans have intersecting identities. What they choose to call themselves or embrace is a tribute to the American experiment as a whole and shouldn’t be demagogued by racist opportunists. In the end, being identified with those who unreservedly accept you is the only identity politics that matters.