Kamala Harris has America focused on multiracial identity

An election year that was already bitterly partisan has been completely upended by President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 White House race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. But it’s not just Harris’s late entry that has electrified things. It’s also the history to be made if the likely Democratic nominee becomes the first female president who is also multiracial.

The daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, both of whom immigrated to the U.S. during the Civil Rights Movement, Harris’s historic presidential bid has again put a spotlight on American identity politics and the growing number of people who say they are multiracial.

Different countries divide people into categories depending on different national traditions. The U.S., with its slavery-molded history, divides people into Black or white, and nine million people identified as multiracial in 2010.

When Harris ran for vice president in 2020, 33.8 million people in the U.S. identified as being more than one race, according to the census.

Is Kamala Harris a Black woman?

Yes, she is. Her father Donald Jasper Harris, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Jamaica.

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