On Turning Black

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

On Turning Black

Aug. 1, 2024

Esau McCaulley

By Esau McCaulley

Contributing Opinion Writer

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/opinion/trump-harris-black-indian.html

 

During his interview before the National Association of Black Journalists this week, Donald Trump was asked if he would call upon his fellow Republicans to refrain from labeling Vice President Kamala Harris a “D.E.I. candidate” for the presidency. Rather than condemn his party’s increasingly troubling language on the topic, Mr. Trump took the opportunity to question Ms. Harris’s racial identity.

 

“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” he 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? I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t.”

 

This is all clearly untrue. Ms. Harris graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university, and she is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a historically Black sorority. Her biographies and self-descriptions throughout her career have cited both her Black and Indian identities.

 

My wife is white, so we have multiracial children. Depending on the context, they can refer to themselves as Black or multiracial. When my children describe themselves using the latter term, they are acknowledging that their mother is a part of their story as well. Does Mr. Trump really expect interracial people to deny half of their families?

 

But the lived experience of interracial families was probably far from his concern. His comments seemed designed to convince African Americans that Ms. Harris is not authentically Black, and, therefore, African Americans should not vote for her. This move also suggests to Indian Americans that Ms. Harris has abandoned her Asian identity, and so they should not support her either.

When Mr. Trump went on to suggest that “somebody should look into” Ms. Harris’s supposed shift in identity, he seemed to be prompting the two groups to claim her as solely their own, encouraging division.

 

This idea of pitting the interests of minority groups against one another seems to be part of Mr. Trump’s re-election strategy. During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he argued that immigrants who were entering the United States illegally were taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs.”

 

He seemed to assume that all immigrants were unskilled lawbreakers and that most African Americans are low income, competing with those laborers for work.

 

Mr. Trump also seemed to think that African Americans and Indian Americans only support candidates based on racial identity. It’s true that high rates of Black people voted for Barack Obama, for example — that pattern is common in elections. But Mr. Trump’s conceit relies on an assumption that racial groups are not interested in any kind of issues-based analysis. If Mr. Trump really believed in the strength of his case for the African American vote, he could make it through an honest defense of his record.

 

The idea that only one racial group can succeed at a time and that such progress must come at the expense of other minorities is not new. In the early 20th century, naturalized citizenship was mostly limited to white people or people of African descent. This meant that Asian or Latino immigrants could try to claim a white identity and participate in economic and social benefits of being non-Black or forgo citizenship. This was the Jim Crow era, so claiming a white identity, even if it was only partial or a fiction, meant receiving certain rights denied to African Americans.

 

American citizenship required accepting the racial hierarchy — and, therefore, Black disenfranchisement. But the Asian and Latino immigrants who went through the process of claiming white identity for the sake of citizenship often remained the subject of discrimination. There was no winning a rigged game.

 

In post-World War II America, certain politicians continued to encourage competition among different minority groups. Asian Americans were depicted as the model minority group whose economic progress supposedly disproved African American claims of ongoing personal and structural racism. Racism, so the argument went, couldn’t be real if all minority groups don’t encounter it in the same form.

 

History reminds us that ethnic minorities always lose when we battle one another for the scraps from America’s bounty, instead of contending for more opportunity for everyone. The goal is not to secure a place in the racial hierarchy but to dismantle it.

 

The best way to respond to Mr. Trump’s attempts at division is not mere condemnation of his statements. That is easy enough. Real resistance must include the positive work of interracial cooperation to learn each other’s stories, customs, joys, fears and hopes. It must include acknowledging the ways that we have indeed discriminated against each other in the past.

 

Over the last few years, the Republican Party has consistently depicted diversity as America’s most glaring weakness. I might be foolish enough to think it remains our greatest strength.

 

Esau McCaulley (@esaumccaulley) is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South” and the children’s book “Andy Johnson and the March for Justice.” He is an associate professor of New Testament and public theology at Wheaton College.