Harris is epitome of Bay Area
Blended background makes her the new American everywoman
Kamala Harris looks like the Bay Area.
She is Black and Asian American, born in Oakland to a mother from India and a father from Jamaica who met in graduate school at UC Berkeley. She is Baptist, with a Sanskrit name that means “lotus” from her Hindu heritage, but is known to her Jewish stepchildren as “Momala,” a play on her first name and an endearing Yiddish term for “little mama.”
She also looks like the future of America, where demographers say, by 2043 white people are expected to be a minority group. The number of multiracial Americans is expected to
triple by 2060 to about 26.7 million.
Yet it took less than 48 hours from Joe Biden’s naming Harris his running mate for her blended background to become a campaign issue. While Democrats quickly celebrated what former President Barack Obama called Harris’ “life story … that I and so many others can see ourselves in,” President Donald Trump stoked an incendiary claim that questioned Harris’ eligibility to serve as vice president because her parents were born outside the U.S.
“I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Trump said Thursday. “I have no idea if that’s right. I would have assumed that the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president.”
Born in 1964 at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in Oakland, Harris is clearly a U.S. citizen and eligible for the highest office in the land. While Trump’s comments, echoing his false birther movement campaign over Obama’s citizenship, drew sharp rebukes from both Democrats and Republicans, they signaled what appears to be the Trump campaign’s relentless focus on race and disgruntled white voters.
However, a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that Trump is now losing their support: White people are split evenly between Trump and Biden, the poll found, after favoring Trump by 6 points in June.
“Some of it is that the reality show has outlasted its popularity,” said Claremont McKenna College politics professor Jack Pitney, a former Republican operative who left the party after Trump was elected. “Every hit show eventually loses its audience. People get bored. He’s got a limited number of catchphrases, and we’re now in the eye-roll stage of his presidency.”
Supporters of Harris say she’s a symbol of the diversity many voters crave.
But in a moment when the Black Lives Matter movement is forcing the country to acknowledge deep systemic injustices in the American story, do all people of color truly see their own story in Harris’ background? Her story includes what critics have called a tough record as a prosecutor who locked up a disproportionate number of Black and Latinx people.
“It’s disappointing because I want to be happy for a Black woman,” said Chaney Turner, an activist and member of the Oakland Cannabis Regulatory Commission who is Black and thinks Harris’ work as a prosecutor, including overseeing marijuana convictions, was harmful to Black people. “That’s something we need to acknowledge whether we are going to vote for her or not.”
But with Trump amplifying racist tropes, even progressive advocates and critics like Turner who have concerns about Harris’ and Biden’s views say the only viable alternative is a nonstarter.
“I’m going to do my part in getting this person out of the White House,” Turner said of Trump, “and I’m going to continue doing the work to hold whoever is voted into office accountable to continue to make change that we need.”
Even Jamal Trulove — who was wrongly convicted of murder in San Francisco while Harris was district attorney there and spent more than six years behind bars before being acquitted — took to Twitter to endorse the Biden-Harris ticket.
“At the end of the day, I’m not going to fall into that Trump trick bag,” he said in a short video.
Too much is being made about Harris’ credentials among the Black community, said Mansour Id-Deen, president of the Berkeley NA ACP.
“I think it’s a false tension,” he said. “I know she was a prosecutor and all of that, but for Black people to get justice in our country, we have to be involved in various aspects of our government. I think you have to look at her entire body of work, and she did some very good things.”
To people who don’t view Harris as Black because of her mixed-race background, Id-Deen would say, “If she was alive during the enslavement period, you know what she would have been. I consider her a Black woman.”
Regardless, Id-Deen thinks Harris will be well equipped to deal with any questions or attacks based on her racial or ethnic background.
“That always comes out no matter what,” he said. “I know she’s prepared for that. She’s probably heard it all her life.”
San Francisco-based Republican National Committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon, an Indian American Trump supporter, thinks the focus on Harris’ background is overblown — a “made-for-media milestone” that Harris is capitalizing on to pander to voters.
“What has she done for people of color?” Dhillon said. “She has done nothing good.”
But Amos Brown, the longtime pastor at Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, where Harris became a member decades ago, thinks her background will be a unifying force.
“That’s what we need,” Brown said. “There’s too much pain from these white evangelicals who are about nationalism.”
As a young man, Brown — who was deeply involved in the fight for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and others — said he met the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi in the 1950s in Michigan at an assembly of young people and educators calling for peace, justice and love.
Harris, he said, “represents a confluence of the histories and land and personalities all coming together.”
Ultimately, though, it will be up to Trump to extinguish or ignite the embers of race as Election Day grows closer. On Friday afternoon, his campaign sent out an email, calling Biden a “serial race-baiter” and linking to a 2012 video of the former vice president telling Black voters that Republican economic policies would “put y’all back in chains.”
During the 2008 campaign, Republican candidate John McCain famously doused the racist rhetoric of a supporter at a town hall, defending his opponent Obama as “a decent family man.”
Pitney thinks we’ll see nothing of the sort from Trump.
“Trump’s real trouble in recent weeks is that his assumptions about public opinion are decades out of date,” he said. “He doesn’t seem to be picking up on that.”