On the same day that former President Trump claimed before a national gathering of Black journalists that Vice President Kamala Harris “was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she became a Black person,” his running mate Sen. JD Vance accused Harris of being a “phony” who “grew up in Canada” (she attended high school in Montreal) and used “a fake Southern accent” at a rally. Both men’s accusations sound eerily like those leveled against the rapper Drake by his fellow hip-hop titan Kendrick Lamar (and many others) in a rap beef whose effects linger.
Drake has been accused of being a “colonizer” whose Canadian identity and eager embrace of various aspects and accents of a wide range of Black culture make him racially suspect. Such arguments, whether made by racially troubled white men or Black icons, deny the complexity and diversity of Blackness. Trump and Vance have little understanding of and less respect for the multiracial strains and complicated cultural mixtures of Black identity.
Harris has from the start acknowledged her Indian heritage and her Jamaican roots. In our national context, biracial Blackness has always covered a multitude of skin types, light or dark, Caucasian or Indian and lots more besides. Millions of Black Americans, because of the history of slavery conservatives tend to ignore, have all sorts of ethnic blood in their veins and all sorts of figures in their family trees — a grandfather who was Nati.