Let’s talk about race
Why is it so hard to discuss Kamala Harris’ multiracial heritage?
For most of her life, Noreen Khan-Mayberry has felt pressure to pick a side. Her father is Indian-Pakistani, her late mother was Haitian.
If she chose one ethnic group over the other, she’d be denying a big part of who she is. That never seemed right.
So when her husband, Chris Mayberry, who is Black American, told her a few years ago about a politician named Kamala Harris, who is also of Indian and Black Caribbean heritage, Khan Mayberry felt like there was someone in the world who walked in her shoes.
“I was never denied by either part of my heritage. My South Asian family accepted me, and my Black family accepted me. But I always felt different,” said Khan Mayberry, a Ph.D. space toxicologist and author known as “The Tox Doc.”
Earlier this month, Harris accepted the Democratic vice presidential nomination and became the first Black woman and Asian American on a majorparty ticket. Her multiracial heritage has taken center stage. (Harris’ parents, Shyamala and Donald Harris, met at the University of California, Berkeley during the civil rights movement.)
Ironically, Khan-Mayberry and Harris have such parallel lives that it seems like their paths could have intersected.
They both have popular Hindi Urdu first names. They both attended historically black colleges — Harris at Howard University and Khan-Mayberry at Xavier and Texas Southern universities. They both pledged the same African-American sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, the oldest historically Black sorority.
Both are Black Caribbean and South Asian. And they both have faced a world that sees them as one race or the other, but rarely of both.
Top: As a multiracial woman, Missouri City’s Noreen Khan-Mayberry has felt pressure to identify with just one ethnicity. She poses at home with her daughter, Nicole Mayberry, 14, who was crowned the first Teen Universe Pre-Teen Texas in May.
Though my own parents are Black American, I have some friends who are multiracial and others who have multiracial children. I never have understood why this great nation seems to force them to pick a side.
In 2000, the U.S. Census for the first time allowed Americans to pick more than one racial category. Before that, many multiracial people were counted in only one category. Also, the population identifying with two or more races is projected to be the fastestgrowing racial/ethnic group between 2010 and 2020, with a 36 percent increase.
Khan-Mayberry was often teased for having an Indian father, she said, and was questioned about her “Blackness” because of it. As she grew into adulthood, she knew life would have been easier had she dropped her maiden name, Khan, all together.
“I am Black Haitian, Indian and Pakistani. I’m proud of that,” she said. “But everywhere I go, I’m mistaken for something. It can make you feel like you don’t fit in anywhere.”
In Harris’ 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” she describes herself as a proud American, a daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants.
The fact that Harris and Khan-Mayberry are subjected to questions about their heritage is part of the underlying goal of the concept of race, said Vida A. Robertson, the director of the Center for Critical Race Studies and associate professor of English and humanities at the University of Houston-Downtown.
“Race is a social construct,” he said. “It’s not natural, and it’s not real.
Its goal is to maintain white supremacy and white purity. Its job is to categorize people and put them in their place.”
The hierarchy goes like this, he said: white, Asian, Latino and Black.
“Anytime Black touches another race, the default is Black. This is why a white child can only be constructed by two purely white people. Blackness is the great contaminate. So that any race mixed with Black is always Black. It’s ridiculous and racist,” Robertson said.
For that reason, former President Barack Obama, who was born to a white mother and Black father, dealt with endless questioning of his identity but was always identified as
Black, never white.
Historically, the prevailing criterion for deciding who is Black was the principle of hypodescent, or the “one drop rule.” It basically meant that anyone with any African ancestry is, simply, Black. To Robertson’s point, it was a way to assign racial status with Black people at the bottom.
Some 6.2 million U.S. adults — or 2.4 percent of the country’s adult population — report being two or more races, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of 2018 U.S. Census Bureau data. Of these Americans, 22 percent are white and American Indian, 21 percent are Black and white, 20 percent are white and Asian American, 4 percent are Black and American Indian, and 2 percent are Black and
Asian American. About 3 in 10 (31 percent) are some other combination, including 9 percent who select three or more races.
According to Pew Research Center, 1 in 5 adults with a multiracial background said they have felt pressure from friends, family or society in general to choose one of the races in their background over another. Multiracial adults with a Black background were among the most likely to say they had felt such pressure to identify as a single race.
I attended an all-girl, predominantly white Catholic high school in which the discussion of race came up in history class. One of the students asked the teacher if children of mixed-race parents, namely one Black and one white, would have the appearance of being striped. Like a zebra.
I remember glaring at the girl, wondering what reckless adult in her life told her such ridiculousness. But that wasn’t an anomaly.
VeroniQue Shipley, director of operations at a commercial real estate firm, knows too well the pain of such ignorance.
Though her late mother,
Joelle LeSage, was white and a native of France and her father is Black from Ohio, Shipley identifies as a Black woman. She said she was called “zebra,” “Oreo,” “mixed breed” and more growing up in Friendswood.
“I got tired of explaining who I was, and there was a time I was ashamed,” she said. “But it wasn’t until my mother took me to work one day, and I saw all of the photos of me on her desk. My white mother owned me every day, and she didn’t have any shame associated with me. So how dare I have it with her?”
Both Khan-Mayberry and Shipley say being multiracial is complicated, but they are proud of their heritage.
“As I’ve gotten older,
I’ve realized it’s a blessing. It’s given me a unique perspective, and it’s made me strong. I will never deny either of my parents’ heritage to fit in. I’m proud to be biracial,” Khan-Mayberry said.
Shipley said her mother, who was killed in a car accident by a drunk driver when Shipley was just 15, also instilled in her a love for both her Black and white sides. She even made Shipley a T-shirt with a large Oreo cookie on it and said she could wear it proudly because she was a “special treat.” She turned a negative nickname into a point of pride.
She’s never forgotten that.