This was what former president and current Republican party presidential candidate Donald Trump told the National Association of Black Journalists convention on July 31. It was a revealing insight into how he viewed his rival Kamala Harris’s multiracial identity.

During a heated exchange, Trump wrongly claimed that Harris, a woman of Black and South Asian heritage, had shifted her racial identity over the course of her career. Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, subsequently doubled down in support of his boss, using language such as “chameleon” and “flip flopping” to describe Harris’s politics and identity.

These comments were inherently disrespectful, as no one has the right to dictate another person’s racial identity. But the Trump-Vance ticket has tried to use Harris’s multiracial identity as a political tool to foster distrust in her among the American population.

Multiracial racism in America

So, why was Trump and Vance’s language so harmful? Despite being one of the most racially diverse countries in the world, the US has played a significant role in the perpetuation of racism.

The early 20th century introduced the “one drop rule” to America, which codified racism into law in some US states. It asserted that any person with even one Black ancestor was considered racially Black, regarding multiracial Americans with white ancestry “impure” and viewed them as contaminated.

This was a political effort to maintain power over enslaved Black populations, as “racial mixing” blurred the lines between who could be considered free, and who was not.

Prior to 1967 and the landmark Loving v Virginia judgment, which which ruled that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional, almost half of the states enforced anti-miscegination laws that made interracial relations illegal, directed at Black-White unions but extended to ethnic groups. Therefore, mixed-race identities were discriminated against based on physical appearance, affecting their access to segregated residential areas and other social spaces.

One byproduct of this hateful racial theory was that mixed-race people, particularly women, became mythologised as deceitful and cunning tricksters. Historical and current white ruling classes feared multiracial people were somehow “shape shifters”, who accessed segregated white spaces and resources. Today, this appears in the way racial categories are imposed into which mixed-race people simply do not fit.

While mixedness is no longer considered a contamination, lingering beliefs in racial stratification can provoke uncomfortable emotions towards mixed-race identities, whose physical appearances do not match racist stereotypes about different ethnic groups.

This all makes Trump and Vance’s comments that much worse.

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For the full article written by Rhianna Garrett visit the Conversation.

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