Yes. Obviously.
Although, if we want to be pedantic about it, it’s less clear that she’s African American. In the US, “Black” is split into two groups: Black African and Black Caribbean. Harris is mixed race—Indian on her mother’s side, and Jamaican on her father’s side—which would classify her as Black Caribbean.
Granted, the reason there are Black people in the Caribbean was because they were taken there in the slave trade from Africa, and another term for it is “African Caribbean”, so personally I’m not calling out any Black Caribbean people who identify as African American. And plenty of people in the US use “Black” and “African American” synonymously, rather than a term that denotes a different category of people.
Case in point, Wikipedia currently describes Kamala Harris as the first African American Vice-President, while citing a White House page that only describes her as Black American. Can we trust any secondary sources, when secondary sources are so inattentive to the distinction? What if we asked her directly? In one interview, Harris was asked if she was African American, and she said she’s Black–a response that silently respects the distinction without drawing attention to it.
Why the distinction does and doesn’t matter
When so many sources ignore the distinction, does the distinction meaningfully exist at all? Race is socially constructed after all, and if people entirely forgot about a racial distinction then that distinction would cease to exist.
But I think this distinction will stick around. For one thing, “African American” is American terminology, and obviously doesn’t make sense in, say, the UK. And you can find many articles from Black perspectives explaining the distinction between African American and Black.
Most Black Americans can be traced back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade which, besides being bad for the obvious reasons, also cut them off from their African cultural heritage. That they have African ancestry is obvious, but they lose connection to anything more specific.
However, some Black Americans are more recent voluntary immigrants, such as Barack Obama’s Kenyan father, or Kamala Harris’s Jamaican father. Usually, voluntary immigrants maintain a stronger connection to their culture of origin. So in the immigrant context, calling people African may be rather reductive. Africa is a very big place! And it’s particularly reductive for people who immigrated from the Caribbean, which is not even in Africa.
Nonetheless, Black immigrants to the US must deal with not just how they perceive themselves, but how other people perceive them. We perceive them as Black. This is what the distinction between ethnicity and race is often trying to get at. We have our ethnic heritage—which may not be immediately obvious to an external observer—and then we have our race, a socially constructed classification that we simply know and perceive.
Conservative lies
Recently, Donald Trump made a false claim that Kamala Harris only recently “turned” Black, in an interview in front of the National Association of Black Journalists.
I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.
I was curious how conservative news sources would spin this, and whether any of them would bring up pedantry about “African American” vs “Black”. My expectation was disconfirmed–I didn’t find any news sources talking about it.
However, I found a Daily Show clip from 2020, which includes conservatives argue she isn’t African American because she’s Jamaican. On the one hand, they’re being pedantic by denying that Harris is African-American. And on the other, they’re being conveniently unpedantic, by failing to acknowledge that she is nonetheless still Black.
The underlying conservative logic, is that Black people will vote for Harris because she’s Black. Therefore the tactic is to call Harris’ Blackness into question. But since Harris really is Black, the only way they can question it is with lies and bullshit.
Finding the grain of truth
But I’m not going to try to argue the complete opposite. I think it’s a form of condescension to suppose that Black people will vote for candidates solely because they’re Black, to the exclusion of all considerations. One would hope that a Black candidate is aware and sympathetic to Black American issues at the policy level, but the truth is that no single individual can represent all of Black American experience, as varied as it is.
To be more blunt, presidential candidates certainly tend to be drawn from a more privileged crowd—and so POC candidates tend to be drawn from the more privileged subgroups of POC. Is it a coincidence that both Barack and Harris come from immigrant backgrounds? I don’t think so. In a process called “brain drain”, certain immigrants tend to be relatively wealthy and educated, because those are the people with the greatest resources to immigrate. These immigrants may still deal with racism that hurts their standing relative to similarly wealthy and educated White citizens, but benefit from class privilege relative to others of the same race.
Brain drain can be seen from a cursory glance at either of Kamala Harris’s parents. Her mother moved to the US to work on her Masters. Her father, while descended from Jamaican slaves, moved to the US to work on his PhD. And what can we expect? Quite reasonably, we want our presidents to be well-educated, and so they come from educated backgrounds.
So, I would like to acknowledge the space for nuance. Just be careful not to abuse it.
When I searched for perspectives on why Kamala Harris’ experience may be different, what I found was the ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) movement from 2019. It was controversial, to put it lightly. ADOS was accused of xenophobia, anti-immigration advocacy, and being a tool of conservatives. Also, Kamala Harris is literally an American descendant of slavery, so what are they even talking about? Gosh, when I acknowledge space for nuance, I don’t mean I support that.
I’m mixed White/Asian American, and I also come from an immigrant “brain drain” background. I’m not voting for Harris because she’s Asian or mixed race. That’s just a nice to have. I’m voting for her because she’s not the fascist.
So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?
-Trump
Both. Go to hell, Trump.
One thing to keep in mind about African Americans is that most of them had ancestors who were brought here 3 centuries ago. It’s hard to hold on to the culture left behind for that long. I’m 2nd generation American (Scandinavian and northern European) and my generation of American-born cousins has vanishingly little of our culture just 2 generations ago. For example, I come from a lutefisk-consuming culture back in The Auld Countree, and I know my grandparents ate it at least a couple of times after coming to the USA and likely served it to my parents on occasion, but I was not raised in a lutefisk-eating culture, and my adult kids probably have no idea what lutefisk even is. We’ve assimilated into American culture in 2 – 3 generations.
As for Kamala Harris, I think it’s up to her to decide how she identifies–not up to Trump. She has traditions from two cultures she can mix or match.
I’m not the only one who remembers all the racists using the “but he’s half white” defense when called out on blatantly racist bullshit during the Obama election and presidency, right?
This strikes me as awfully similar, they get to throw around their tired racist tropes, and then pretend it doesn’t count, because she’s not really “black”.
sorry, it’s a lot more shallow and dismissive than your post, but I just don’t care what excuse these dumb racists are trying to use, they can fuck off with their stupid, blatant racism.
@lochaber: yes, I remember the same stupidity toward Obama, and the tap-dancing around of, “Oh, I couldn’t POSSIBLY be racist against him because HE’S HALF WHITE–checkmate, libtards!”
Trump has gone full-blown racist against Harris, which gives his followers the green light to do the same.
I watch both the PBS News Hour and Washington Week, and I’m getting so very sick of both. Trump is an intellectually incurious, lying, racist, bully, who admires dictators, tried to kill this whole country, and who’s mentally decompensating in front of our very eyes, but look, Harris is equally bad as a candidate because mumble-mumble-just-shut-up-that’s-why.
Does Harris see herself as black? Well, she chose to fly across the country to go to an HBCU, and while there, she joined the first black sorority in the USA and remained active with them her whole life. Those are some pretty significant tells right there.
But ultimately, it doesn’t matter what her race is, except to the racists. The question we need to be asking is if she can be a better president than her opponent. To which the answer is, “Well, duh, OBVIOUSLY.”
@lochaber
These are also people who don’t like social positions that are fuzzy or flexible. Conservatives tend to get annoyed when dealing with conceptions of Indigenous identity that is built on social acceptance and group membership rather than blood. You also see this with trans people where more conservative people have to confront that social gender categories are flexible
Plus they’re just bad at ambiguity
So they want a rigid, simple answer here
Of course the fact that they can use it as an excuse for racism is a plus (of course they don’t have a nuanced understanding of racism either)
Although I have heard it used thoughtlessly (and without any bad intention) by Americans of Black British people (who are mostly of Afro-Caribbean heritage although there are an increasing number who are not), suggesting that it’s being used as a synonym for “Black”.