It certainly didn’t take long — less than two weeks in this instance — for the inevitable race issue to be thrust into the mix of politics associated with our current campaign for the elective office that runs our great nation. But I suspect many of us definitely knew it was coming — like the sun rising to usher in a new day.
When Vice President Kamala Harris found herself the heir apparent for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States a few weeks ago, many of us already knew that it was only a matter of time before race would be coarsely injected into the campaign. Being of Indian and Jamaican heritage, Harris resides in a similar space in our still overtly race-conscious society as former presidential candidate Barack Obama did in 2008, Obama being of white American and Black Kenyan heritage. Both were raised as Black, which put them in a position of being “otherwised” or positioned by some as racially ambiguous, although both Harris and Obama were born in this country to parents of mixed racial backgrounds.
It happened at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Chicago, where Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump falsely suggested that Harris had only recently embraced her Black heritage as opposed to her co-mingled South Asian side. The fact that she attended and graduated from Howard University, a historically Black college — and joined a prominent Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, while there — did not seem to pause Trump from attempting to go for the racial jugular during an interview session with an audience of Black journalists, many of whom obviously discerned his ham-handed antic.
“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?” Trump blurted out.
The obvious fact for most of us is that she is both, considering her parentage.
Harris is hardly alone in being victimized in this manner. Obama experienced similar treatment, including those who questioned whether he could be accurately described as African American since he didn’t have obvious ancestors who were American slaves. For years, Trump openly questioned Obama’s citizenship, claiming at one point that he had proof that the former president wasn’t born in the United States — an obvious lie proven so by Obama’s official U.S. birth certificate.
Just when some Americans believe that racial division is a thing of the past, the opposite routinely resurfaces. Some Trump supporters have also referred to Harris as a so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) hire, a baseless affirmative action slur owing to her background as an elected prosecutor from the largest state in the nation and her recent experience as vice president.
Why does this kind of thing keep happening in this country that has endured and finally risen above so much racial animosity — from slavery through the Civil War (fought to end the former) to legal segregation to de facto discrimination, the latter of which continues today?
A possible answer is that racial tension and separation are our shared American legacy, as persistent and imbedded in us as the earth we walk on and the air we breathe. And it is unlikely to ever change until people like Trump fade into the darker shadows of our history, allowing the rest of us to emerge into a shared status of togetherness and freedom from the racial baggage that prevents us from achieving any “Make America Great Again” reality — whatever that is and whenever that was. Many Americans likely still believe that it will inevitably happen, but it is a long time coming indeed.
The fact that NABJ — an organization I was a member of as a former journalist — allowed Trump a national forum to disseminate his racial bile should serve as a clear lesson to other organizations that if you invite a racist into your house, you should expect him to fling his tired racism into your face. This group in particular should have known this and declined to be played by such an obvious charlatan.
Keith Bromery is a substitute teacher for Broward County Public Schools.
