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SUNDAY SCIENCE: KAMALA HARRIS’ REFUSAL OF THE ONE-DROP RULE  
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Yolanda Moses
May 4, 2021
Sapiens.org
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_ Vice President Harris’ views on her identity are pushing the U.S.
public to look beyond entrenched, problematic racial boundaries. _

Kamala D. Harris, Harris for President

 

When Kamala Devi Harris was sworn in as vice president earlier this
year, many people in the U.S. and around the globe recognized that
gender and racial barriers were being broken. But they didn’t
necessarily agree on what those racial barriers were.

That’s because Harris does not fit neatly into the racial categories
that U.S. society has set up.

Many in the U.S. heralded her as the first Black woman
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be vice president.

But Harris also made history as the first person of Asian descent to
become vice president. “Kamala Harris’ story is the story of a
changing, inclusive America,” said Neil Makhija
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the executive director of IMPACT, an Indian American advocacy group,
when Biden first announced Harris as his pick for VP. “At a time of
rapid change, she ties all our national threads together.”

While many in the South Asian community, both in the U.S. and in
India
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excitedly claimed Harris as an Indian American success story, some
news outlets downplayed or ignored her Asian heritage. Throughout her
political career, she has repeatedly been portrayed in the media
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Black, first and foremost.

Why does her mixed identity matter to some people? It matters in a
country such as the United States, which has based so much of its
history implicitly and explicitly on racial identity—and especially
on the separation of White identities from non-White identities.

“Don’t you let anyone tell you who you are. You tell them who you
are.” - Dr. Shyamala Gopalan pic.twitter.com/8rs0sauN9E
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— Maya Harris (@mayaharris_) August 12, 2020
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Kamala Harris (left) stands with her sister, Maya, and their mother,
Shyamala Gopalan, who immigrated to the U.S. from India.

This history goes back centuries
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statutes were first passed
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American colonies in the 1660s—before the U.S. had even declared
independence from Britain. These statutes prohibited interracial
marriage, with the aim of maintaining the “purity” of what became
known as “White” bloodlines.

After the Civil War and into the early 20th century, as Black people
who were formerly enslaved gained more civil rights, some White
leaders in Southern states such as Arkansas
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to maintain racial separations by passing laws stating that one drop
of “Negro blood” made a person Black. The legacy of the law of
hypodescent—or the “one-drop rule
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as it has been called—was officially adopted by the U.S. census in
1930
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lives on
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practice today. It helps explain why people who are mixed race in the
U.S. tend to be categorized as belonging to whatever group is ranked
lower on the racial hierarchy.

I and other anthropologists have long understood that what we
call “races” are invented categories
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in external appearances. Seen from that perspective, it’s clear that
the one-drop rule was purely a social construct
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biological one. It was designed to make sure that people with Black
ancestry, no matter how White they looked, were considered Black and
thus kept in an inferior position. It’s a clear reminder that
while _race_ is not biological, _racism_—and the belief that race
is real—has devastating social, economic, and political
consequences.

Given this history, it matters that Harris proudly claims she sees
herself as both African American _and_ South Indian. As an
anthropologist who studies inequality, I see her self-identification
as a repudiation of the one-drop rule and the unjust racial hierarchy
it represents.

✽

As people in the U.S. watched Harris on the campaign trail—first as
a potential Democratic presidential nominee and later as President Joe
Biden’s running mate—they wanted to know about her background.
Some reporters and pundits, accustomed to putting people in nice, neat
categories, struggled with how to define
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mixed heritage.

Rather than taking a reductionist view, which would require her to
choose between identifying either as Black or Indian, Harris herself
has chosen both—in large part due to her upbringing.

In her 2019 autobiography, _The Truths We Hold: An American Journey_
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Harris writes extensively about growing up in the flatlands
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a multiracial neighborhood in Berkeley, California, as the proud
daughter of scientist Shyamala Gopalan
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Harris has often talked in public about her close relationship with
her mother
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who died in 2009.

After immigrating to the U.S. from India at the age of 19, Gopalan met
the man who would become Harris’ father, Donald Harris, a Jamaican
immigrant, while attending graduate school in the early 1960s at the
University of California, Berkeley. Both Gopalan and Donald Harris
were involved in the Civil Rights movement sweeping the U.S.—and
especially Berkeley—as intellectuals and activists who fought for
social justice
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Gopalan became a cancer researcher, while Donald Harris went on to get
his Ph.D. in economics and teach at Stanford University.

“I am who I am,” Harris has said. “You might need to figure it
out, but I’m fine with it.”

Harris and her sister, Maya, grew up in a progressive academic
environment where they were taught to embrace the differences between
people. After Gopalan and Donald Harris divorced in the early 1970s,
Gopalan maintained custody. She relied on close friends and neighbors
from their vibrant, diverse neighborhood to look after her girls while
she was working in the lab or away on professional trips. On Sundays,
they attended the Black church in their neighborhood. And they
continued to be part of diverse communities, such as when Gopalan
worked as a researcher in the multicultural city of Montreal.

As Harris described while on the campaign trail
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daughters to be comfortable with both sides of their
identities—proud of being Black in U.S. society and just as proud of
their South Asian heritage. Gopalan seems to have understood that the
U.S. was a place where only one drop of “Negro blood” made you
Black, and she was determined to raise her daughters to celebrate both
sides of their identity.

It takes a special kind of parent—in this case, an immigrant from a
society that has its own institutionalized stratification system, the
Hindu caste system in India—to recognize the racial stratification
at the heart of U.S. society.

Gopalan herself was a trailblazer. Even though she came from a
privileged upper-caste family, women rarely left India on their
own—much less to pursue a career in science. With the blessing of
her parents, Gopalan applied to Berkeley and set out on her own to
attend university in a foreign country. Coming to the U.S. at a time
when migration from India was severely restricted to around 100 people
a year, she faced discrimination at work.

While growing up, Harris took trips to the Indian state of Tamil Nadu
with her mother. Gopalan grew up in and around Chennai, the capital of
Tamil Nadu, and came from a family of prominent civil servants
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Harris says in her autobiography that her mother often spoke in the
Tamil language when she was upset or emotional. Being exposed to and
learning to deeply value another language and culture gave her the
best of both worlds, she writes.

As Harris got older, she often honored the hard work of Black
activists and professionals who struggled for freedom and justice. She
attended the historically Black Howard University, where she joined
one of the oldest Black women’s sororities in the U.S., Alpha Kappa
Alpha
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She maintains close ties with her sorority sisters today.

✽

While she embraces both sides of her identity, Harris identifies as a
“proud American” above all else. She has said in interviews that
she does not struggle with her mixed identity. “I am who I
am,” she told an interviewer
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“I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine
with it.”

Still, some people want to pigeonhole and define Harris. They remain
uncomfortable with the expansive understandings of race, ancestry, and
heritage that Harris represents.

Unfortunately, even policies purportedly designed to capture human
ancestral diversity at times constrict the lived complexities of those
identities. For example, people such as Harris who claim biracial or
multiracial heritages are often forced to choose one race over the
other on official forms or other instruments of government designed to
count the population and organize people according to predetermined
sets of categories.

Some multiracial people in the U.S., such as Avani Hamilton
(pictured), view Harris as an inspiration. Lea Suzuki/The San
Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

This narrowmindedness is changing—but slowly. The U.S. census
allowed people to officially report more than one ethnic or racial
identity for the first time in 2000
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That year, only 2.4 percent of the population listed “two or more
races [[link removed]].”
In 2010, 2.9 percent of people did. But according to the Pew Research
Center
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the number of people who identify as multiracial in the U.S. continues
to grow—at an estimated rate of three times as fast as the rest of
the population.

Harris is a welcome figure to many—a representative of the U.S. in a
globalized world that looks more and more just like her. Recent
research suggests
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60 percent of multiracial people in the U.S. say, like Harris, they
are proud of their mixed heritage.

Harris has moved far beyond the one-drop rule and embraced her dual
identity. So should we.

_THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED MAY 4, 2021_

_YOLANDA MOSES is a professor of anthropology and a former associate
vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and excellence at the
University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on the
broad question of the origins of social inequality in complex
societies and issues of diversity and change in universities. She has
co-authored two books about race: Race: Are We So Different?
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Real Is Race?: A Sourcebook on Race, Culture, and Biology
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In 2017, she received a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural
Competence at the University of Sydney in Australia. Moses is a former
president of the American Anthropological Association._

_SAPIENS is a digital magazine about everything human, told through
the stories of anthropologists._

In January 2016, we launched SAPIENS with the aim of bringing together
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__

A Blood Test Accurately Diagnosed Alzheimer’s 90% of the Time, Study
Finds
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Pam Belluck
New York Times
July 28, 2024
It was much more accurate than primary care doctors using cognitive
tests and CT scans. The findings could speed the quest for an
affordable and accessible way to diagnose patients with memory
problems.

* Science
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* biology
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* race
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* Racism
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* one-drop rule
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* social constructs
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* Anti-miscegenation statutes
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