Nearly 60 years ago, on Oct. 20, 1964, Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California.
That day, at the very moment she took her first breath, the future vice president of the United States became Black.
Harris was Black when she was a kindergarten student in Berkeley, Calif., where she was bussed to a white neighborhood as part of the city’s desegregation program.
Harris was Black when the woman who ran her daycare center decorated the walls with pictures of abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.
Harris was Black when she enrolled at Howard University, an HBCU in Washington, D.C., and she was Black when she became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the country’s oldest historically Black sorority.
Harris was Black when she became San Francisco’s district attorney, Black when she was California’s attorney general, Black when she was elected to the U.S. Senate, Black when she was Joe Biden’s running mate and Black when she was sworn in as vice president of the United States.
And she will stay Black until she dies.
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” Harris wrote in “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” her 2019 memoir.
“She knew her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”
That should set the record straight, as if the record about Harris’ racial identity was ever really crooked.
Any doubts about her Blackness are the wicked work of Donald Trump, the former president who tried to pull the same stunt on Barack Obama.
For years, Trump promoted the lie that Obama was born abroad, an evil, racist conspiracy theory aimed at undermining the nation’s first Black president.
Trump has resurrected the strategy, suggesting — to a group of Black journalists, of all people — that Harris only recently began to identify herself as Black.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” Trump said at a National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago. “Now she wants to be known as Black.
“She was Indian all the way,” added Trump, who repeatedly mispronounced Harris’s first name. “And then she made a turn, and she became a Black person.”
Harris, the product of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, took the high road.
“Donald Trump has already proven he cannot unite America,” Harris’ campaign said in a statement. “So he attempts to divide us.”
Harris’ Indian heritage allows her to identify as Southeast Asian, proof that in America, many people check more than just one box.
There’s even dual citizenship, as demonstrated by NBA stars like Joel Embiid, the Philadelphia 76ers center born in Cameroon who holds French and U.S. passports and is a member of Team USA in men’s basketball at the Olympics.
You can be more than one thing, and you don’t always have to choose. You can be French and Canadian. You can be a Jew and a U.S. citizen. You can be Black and a journalist.
That leads us to our other latest Trump controversy. Before Trump ignited a firestorm at the NABJ convention, which wraps up on Sunday, members were divided over whether the former president should have even been invited.
The convention’s co-chair, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, even quit her convention chair post in protest over the invitation.
That seems counter to our mission as journalists, which is to hold Trump accountable — as we would any candidate — and expose the lies.
Mission accomplished.
Harris, unfortunately, was unable to attend because of a scheduling conflict, her campaign said.
If she had been able to make it, she would have rightly faced a round of tough questioning, and she would not have gotten a pass because she is Black.
