For multiracial Americans, Trump’s attack on Harris felt personal

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When the Rev. Adam Shoemaker heard former president Donald Trump question Vice President Harris’s identity as a Black and South Asian American woman this week, he immediately thought back to the dehumanizing question he fielded so many times as a boy.

“What are you?”

Shoemaker, an Episcopal priest who lives in Charleston, S.C., is Arab American. His father is Egyptian and his mother is White. For as long as he can remember, he struggled with feeling like he didn’t fit fully into one group or the other. Trump’s remarks reminded him that some Americans still think he should have to choose.

“I don’t think that anybody should presume to racially identify or categorize another human being,” he said. “And I think that is an inherently racist thing to do because it discounts another human being’s reality.”

Trump’s racist broadside Wednesday, July 31, during a Black journalists conference in Chicago conjured painful memories for America’s fastest-growing racial group – those who identify as belonging to more than one race.

The audience gasped when Trump said: “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. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

More than 33 million Americans – about 1 in 10 – identify as two or more races, according to the 2020 Census. It is a group that is expected to grow. Yet despite their rising numbers, many Americans of multiracial heritage say they feel fundamentally misunderstood.

As Trump continued to belittle Harris on social media, The Washington Post asked people who identify as multiracial to describe their experiences in the United States and recount their reaction to his words. Many said they felt pressured growing up to “choose a side” and embrace just one racial identity. Even among those who did, many said they didn’t feel entirely accepted.

To hear Trump question the Democratic presidential candidate’s right to belong to more than one group left many feeling newly wounded.

“It sort of awakened some feelings of outrage and anger – and hurt, honestly,” said Steve Majors, who is Black and White, and was reminded of being teased at school as a child.

Many of those who wrote to The Post accused Trump of deliberately misunderstanding a person’s freedom to identify as two races at once for his own political gain. Some believed the former president to be genuinely uneducated. Universally, they condemned the remarks, describing Trump’s words as “racist,” “ignorant,” “abhorrent” and “unsurprising.” The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

“Trump was really relying on stereotypes of multiracial people as disloyal and inauthentic, as not having a core identity, and stoking people’s suspicions of multiracial people,” said Nitasha Tamar Sharma, a professor of Black and Asian American studies at Northwestern University.

Harris was born in Oakland, Calif., to immigrant parents. Her mother was born in India and her father in Jamaica. Harris’s father is the descendant of enslaved Black Jamaicans.

The vice president has credited her mother with helping her feel confident in her identity as both a Black American and a South Asian American from a young age.

In her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold,” Harris recounted how her mother took her on trips to India, where they celebrated their heritage. But she made clear to Harris and her sister, Maya, that they were also Black girls.

“She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to ensure we grew into confident, proud Black women,” Harris wrote.

Harris responded to Trump’s remarks Wednesday night at a convention of Black sororities, saying it was “the same old show” of “divisiveness” and “disrespect.”

The vice president’s sense of clarity in her racial identity, fostered by family, isn’t an experience all multiracial people share.

When Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) learned of Trump’s comments, he thought of distant family members who encouraged him growing up to say he was only Cuban, and not also Black. He went on to embrace both aspects of his identity in high school.

Then he ran for office, and found he spent much of his time defending his identity as a Latino while stumping in Latino communities – and convincing voters in Black neighborhoods that he was also Black.

“There’s a lot of unlearning and there’s a lot of learning that needs to be done within our communities,” he said.

Louis Cook, 19, who identifies as White and Asian, said it was difficult to grow up biracial even in a diverse place like California’s Bay Area. His friends would often use his identity as a punchline.

“When I was with White friends, they’d be like, ‘Louis, you’re a little Asian,’ do you know what they’re saying? Can you tell what kind of Asian they are?” Cook recalled. “And even with Asian friends, they’d reverse the joke, ‘Oh do you know what kind of White person they are?’ They would act like I was some sort of expert on these two groups when I’m just trying to navigate my own life.”

Trump’s attacks on Harris only underscore for many how little people who identify as single race understand about the lives of multiracial Americans.

Sonia Smith Kang, vice president of Multiracial Americans of Southern California, who is Black and Latina, said that sometimes when she meets people and explains that she is multiracial, they ask: “What do you feel more of? Who do you identify with more?”

“It’s that kind of pushback that you start to feel like – why am I not heard?” she said. “Why is my identity being parsed out in such a way? And it’s really because somebody else needs to understand you.”

More and more young Americans know just how complicated that can be. Nearly a third of multiracial Americans are younger than 18, according to the 2020 Census. Many of those interviewed by The Post said it took years for them to get to a place where they felt confident in their identity.

Majors, 58, is Black and White but grew up in a Black family, never knowing his White father. There were not many people of more than one race in his community. Many people would try to put him in just one category.

“It was hurtful as a kid to have people look at me and try to fit me into a rigid racial category,” said Majors, a nonprofit marketing executive in Maryland. “In many ways it felt like they were asking me to betray my family and who I thought I was.”

Majors said he worried about how Trump’s messaging on race would affect children watching it – children who have not had time to become comfortable holding multiple identities.

“It heartens me because she [Harris] got to a place that I’m at, which is like that kind of language, that kind of rhetoric, that kind of divisiveness has no place in this race and no place in our country,” he said.

Some Republicans took aim at Harris’s racial identity within hours of President Biden announcing he would not seek reelection. Several lawmakers referred to Harris as a ‘DEI’ choice for the presidency, a reference to corporate diversity, equity and inclusion programs that conservatives have attacked as paths for minorities to get preferential treatment over more qualified White workers.

The former president has doubled down in questioning Harris’s identity, reposting a message by far-right activist Laura Loomer this past week that included a photo of Harris’s birth certificate that showed that her father listed his race as “Jamaican.”

She is “lying about being Black,” Loomer added. She did not respond to a request for comment.

Loomer’s post drew immediate comparisons to Trump’s early political career, when he staked out his position as the most prominent face of the birther movement, which sought to invalidate former president Barack Obama’s legitimate birth certificate, issued in Hawaii, and instead suggest that he was actually born in Kenya. Obama is the son of a White mother from Kansas and Black father from Kenya.

A number of those who shared their views with The Post wondered who Trump’s intended audience was on Wednesday. Some believed Trump failed in an attempt to turn a room of Black journalists against Harris by suggesting she chose to identify as Black for political gain. Others wondered if Trump’s true targets were conservatives watching at home.

Ashley Ramchandani, a 36-year-old who works in local government in Illinois, was reminded Wednesday of hurtful moments in her childhood. Like Harris, she is Black and Indian. Trump was trying to drive a wedge between Black voters and Harris by instilling doubt in her Black bona fides, she said.

“It’s using something that’s divisive within the community to his own advantage,” Ramchandani said. “He was saying to those Black journalists, ‘She’s not one of you,’ and that is not his place to say.”

Justin Jones, 28, said he believes otherwise. The Tennessee House representative, who is Black and Filipino, said Republican lawmakers there have joked publicly about Jones’s ethnicity in interviews, suggesting Jones flits between racial identities when they suit his interests. Jones was one of two lawmakers briefly expelled from the Republican-led state House last year for joining gun-control protests.

In Trump, Jones sees a similar desire to tap into feelings of racial resentment and grievance among his supporters.

“He’s trying to evoke some very painful, very sinister, elements of American history,” Jones said. “It’s clear that the audience was not the people in the room, but the white nationalists in his base, for whom racism is red meat that they feed on.”

Sharma, the professor of Black and Asian American studies, said the nation is at a crossroads not unlike the one during Obama’s first presidential election. She noted he faced questions about why he marked “Black” on the census when he is biracial.

But despite Trump’s recent remarks, some also see room for optimism. The growing population of multiracial Americans means that in time their experiences will be more common. The federal government is recognizing the nation’s increasing diversity. It recently updated how it classifies people by race and ethnicity for the first time in over a quarter-century.

Sharma has two children, ages 14 and 9, who are Black and Indian. They have a great-aunt named Kamala, too. And they know about Harris’s presidential race.

“They are very familiar with her,” Sharma said. “I think they are excited.”