Kamala Harris has reach. She can interview Supreme Court nominees or meet with foreign dignitaries, then move on to hosting a Diwali celebration or dancing enthusiastically alongside an HBCU-style marching band.
Harris, the first black woman and Asian American vice president, developed a dexterity as a person of color that allowed her to navigate the halls of power and the rank and file in a country where race and identity shape how someone is received or embraced.
Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, is a skilled codeswitcher, a term that can refer to the deliberate adjustment of one’s speaking style and facial expression to enhance recognition and ensure that one’s message is received effectively.
Former President Donald Trump, during a controversial interview session at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, showed no familiarity with the concept. He implied that Harris is inauthentic because she embraces all aspects of her heritage. His failure to recognize code-switching also speaks to a prevailing belief that whiteness, often correlated with speaking in clearly articulated English, is the default in our politics and democracy.
“We need to celebrate ourselves in our entirety, which means celebrating all of our identities,” said Christine Chen, co-founder and executive director of APIAVote, an independent community engagement organization focused on the Asian American Pacific Islander community.
“The more a candidate can embrace their multiple identities, the more they can connect with different communities and different people who identify with different issues than what you stand for,” added Chen, who is Chinese American.
Trump, who falsely suggested at the annual gathering of black journalists that the vice president was misleading voters about her race, waded into murkier waters by insinuating that Harris cannot be trusted because she “happened to be black” after promoting her Indian heritage.
Harris doesn’t have to code-switch to prove she’s a Black and Indian-American woman; she was born that way.
Shereen Marisol Meraji, former co-host of the award-winning NPR podcast “Code Switch,” said Harris’ identity is layered and can still be difficult to navigate in a country that once encouraged people of different races to choose one identity over another.
“When you walk through the world the way I have, where I try very hard to embrace both sides of myself, it’s like you’re put through some kind of authenticity test,” said Meraji, who is of Iranian and Puerto Rican descent.
Meraji, an assistant professor of race and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, added: “The ability to code-switch and go into other communities … is a huge advantage. And I think for people who are competing with Kamala Harris, it’s also pretty scary.”
Many politicians of color switch color codes to ensure that key information with cultural resonance is delivered to voters and constituents. This is a familiar concept among Americans of color, including the 33.8 million people who identify as more than one race, according to the latest U.S. Census.
Code-switching isn’t new, and it’s not a skill that’s entirely foreign to white people. But it remains one of the most effective communication tools politicians of color use to exert influence and gain power in places where they historically haven’t had it.
Code-switching increases the likelihood that people who are disadvantaged or overlooked because of systemic racism will receive fair treatment, quality services, or employment.
After Trump questioned Harris’ race in response to a question about his own rhetoric on diversity, equality and inclusion, ABC News interviewer Rachel Scott responded by citing elements of the vice president’s biography that could prove she is Black.
Scott noted that Harris attended Howard University, one of the most prominent historically black colleges and universities in the country. At Howard, Harris became a member of the historically black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. And, most notably, her Jamaican father and Indian mother both immigrated to the U.S. during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
It is also incorrect to suggest that Harris only embraced her Black or Indian identity, or switched between the two, when it gave her political advantage.
In 2003, the year Harris was elected San Francisco district attorney, she told a local newspaper chain that many people were unfamiliar with her identity. “My Native American heritage is just as strong as my African American heritage. One does not exclude the other,” Harris said.
As a candidate for California attorney general, she spoke of her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who taught her and her sister to “share the pride of our culture.” In 2009, Harris told the outlet India Abroad: “If we think about it, India is the oldest democracy in the world — so that’s part of my background, and has undoubtedly had a lot of influence on what I do today and who I am.”
During the 2012 re-election campaign of Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, Harris said she was the underdog in races where her opponent could spend more on advertising and publicity. “I beat the odds and became the first black attorney general,” she said, referring to her 2010 election in California.
Trump’s challenge to Harris’ identity, which drew groans and laughter, cast him as the foremost proponent of a false theory that Obama was ineligible to be president because he was not born in the United States. Trump’s Republican running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, joined Trump on Wednesday in suggesting that Harris is a “con artist who caters to whatever audience she gets in front of.”
“I don’t know if you saw this, but earlier this week … she went to Georgia and started talking with a fake Southern accent,” Vance told the crowd at a rally in Glendale, Arizona, referring to Harris’ campaign event in Atlanta that drew a predominantly black crowd.
Vance, a white man whose wife is Indian-American and whose three children are of mixed race, is far from the first American politician to take aim at the speech and accents of politicians of color. In 2010, the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid came under fire for comments he made years earlier suggesting that Obama was attractive to voters because he was a white black man “without a Negro dialect unless he wanted one.”
White politicians, too, have been known to code-switch when speaking before predominantly black or Latino audiences. And many have done so with varying degrees of success. In 2006, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was criticized for changing her speech cadence during her address at Coretta Scott King’s funeral at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.
The difference is that in the not-so-distant past, the survival of white politicians’ careers did not depend on their ability to code-switch. Harris has a different life experience, still.
Chen said politicians of all races and identities can develop healthy relationships across communities if they show compassion and are sensitive to the needs of their constituents.
“Whether you’re white or black or any other identity, how you present yourself in the community determines whether or not it’s an authentic relationship,” she said. “You’re going to be able to address their concerns more effectively because you’re actually more educated and understand what they’re going through.”
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Rhonda Shafner, an Associated Press researcher in New York, contributed.
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Aaron Morrison is the AP’s Race and Ethnicity News Editor, reporting from New York. He can be reached at [email protected].
