Kamala Harris’ racial and cultural firsts were onstage throughout the Democratic convention
CHICAGO– CHICAGO (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harrison the night she became the first woman of Black or South Asian descent to be nominated for president by a major party, did not explicitly mention the racial and gender firsts she would seek if elected to the White House.
Instead, she opted for direct mentions of her multiracial background and upbringing. She paid homage to her roots as the daughter of a brown woman and a Caribbean man. She celebrated the multicultural village of “aunties” and “uncles” in California’s Bay Area. And after her speech, the family members who joined her onstage for the traditional balloon drop were people of different and often multiple, overlapping races, like Harris herself. Western dress and saris were worn side by side.
It was a way for Harris and others at the convention to showcase her personal story while also offering a visual political message that could resonate with a broad range of people who see themselves in families like hers. About 12.5% of U.S. residents identified with two or more races in 2022, up from 3% a decade earlier, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most comprehensive survey of American life.
The United States is a country that enslaved African Americans for centuries, enforced legal, economic, and social apartheid for another century, and once denied black Americans equal representation at political conventions. The country’s immigration system long maintained explicit racial preferences for white immigrants. It denied women the right to vote until a century ago.
Those issues were not far from the minds of many in the Chicago arena, with many in the audience wearing white in honor of the suffrage movement.
Former President Donald Trump, Harris’ Republican opponent, has questioned her black heritage, falsely suggesting to a gathering of black journalists that she changed the way she presented her racial roots when it suited her. Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, has called Harris a “chameleon,” a reference to her policy changes, according to his allies, and has suggested she adopts a “fake Southern accent.”
“I think we can’t forget that these pendulum swings that we see, the word that continues to cause the pendulum swings is often race,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said in an interview.
Moore, who addressed the convention on Wednesday, said the country has had “fits and starts” in conversations about diversity and racial progress since its founding.
“That’s the underlying problem that we’re still struggling with as a society,” he said later.
During the Congressional roll call, where delegates cast their votes to nominate Harris, several speakers announced the vice president’s middle name: Devi, in a reference to her South Asian heritage.
Several speakers proudly pointed out that Harris has race. Civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton, president and CEO of the National Action Network, noted that Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress and then ran for president in 1972, would be proud of Harris’s achievement.
“I know she is watching us tonight as a black woman stands up to accept the nomination for president of the United States,” Sharpton said.
Comedian DL Hughley, speaking for Harris on Thursday, pushed back against Trump’s suggestion that Harris had once downplayed her black heritage, despite attending the historically black Howard University and frequently speaking about her African-American heritage early in her political career.
“Kamala has been black longer than Trump has been a Republican,” he joked.
Barack Obama, when he became the first black man to accept the Democratic nomination in 2008, cited his Kenyan father and Kansas mother. Hillary Clinton told the 2016 convention that they had “achieved a milestone in our country’s march toward a more perfect union: the first time a major party has nominated a woman for president.”
Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, was born and raised in Oakland, California, a working-class city and once thriving African-American enclave known as the birthplace of the Black Panther Party for self-defense.
“My mother was a brilliant, five-foot-five, brown-haired woman with an accent, and as the oldest child I saw how the world treated her sometimes,” Harris said. “But my mother never lost her cool.”
She added: “She taught us never to complain about injustice, but to do something about it. And she also told us never to do anything ‘half-heartedly.’ And that’s a direct quote.”
Although her mother and father’s marriage was short-lived, she said, her father always encouraged her to take risks. “Run, Kamala! Run! Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything hold you back,” Harris said.
At the start of the convention’s closing program, Harris’ voice was heard in a biographical video played for delegates about the vice president and her sister’s upbringing. Their Indian mother, the vice president explained, raised her daughters as black because she felt that was how the world would see them first.
Harris maintains close ties with Howard, her alma mater, and its sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.
Many of her “sorors” – as members of Alpha Kappa Alpha call each other – and other members of Divine Nine watched in Chicago, as well as in her native San Francisco Bay Area.
Shannon Nash traveled from the Bay Area to Chicago because “it was important to be here and really witness history.”
“The last two weeks have been energetic, hopeful, joyful and just being a part of this movement,” said Nash, co-founder of the group Tech for Kamala and a member of the AKA sorority. “Being able to tell my grandkids that I was there when it happened is just super important.”
Nash, who is Black, said she has older relatives who watched Harris become vice president. But some, like her late grandmother, would have loved to see the first Black woman accept a presidential nomination.
Pat Pullar, a delegate from Clayton County, Georgia, said she wanted to see Harris make history, something she wanted to experience “before I leave this earth.”
“It’s like my ancestors dancing,” she said Wednesday.
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Tracy Brown contributed from Chicago. Aaron Morrison reported from New York City.