In Kamala Harris’s blackness, I see my own

By Danzy Senna

NEW YORK: We seem to be beginning yet another season of a perennially popular American spectacle, “How Much Is That Mulatto in the Window?” I frequently think that, after 400 years, this show is about to go off the air — jump the shark, as it were. But then it returns, with ever more absurd plot lines. Yet, even as a so-called mulatto myself, I can’t stop watching.

The Hollywood pitch goes something like this: Put a racially ambiguous Black person in the public eye — Kamala, Meghan, Barack. Have them declare themselves Black. Count down the minutes before the world erupts into outrage, distress and suspicion. People scream their confusion and doubt, accusing the figure of lying about who they really are. It makes for good TV.

On this week’s episode, Donald Trump got his cameo, accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of switching races. “She was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person,” he said during an appearance in front of the National Association of Black Journalists. His staged bewilderment — implying that Ms. Harris was practicing some sort of sinister racial sorcery — felt wild for 2024, when mixed-race people are everywhere, visually overrepresented in Target commercials and Kardashian family reunions. Yet even in the midst of our fetishization, a stubborn strain of mulatto-phobia remains widespread. And no matter what answer we give to the ubiquitous question — What are you? — someone, somewhere, will accuse us of lying; of being a grifter trying to impersonate another race, a more real race.

Multiracial, mulatto, mixed-nuts, halfies: Whatever you want to call us today, we remain the fastest growing demographic in our country. When we enter the spotlight, we are often treated as specimens, there to be dissected, poked, debated, disputed and disinherited. We are and always have been a Rorschach test for how the world is processing its anxiety, rage, confusion and desire about this amorphous construction we call race.

It goes way back, this practice of poking and prodding mulattos. In 1891, a Tennessee journalist named Will Allen Dromgoole set out to understand the mysterious nature of a group of mixed people calling themselves the “Melungeons,” who lived in isolation in the nearby Appalachian Mountains. They had dusky skin and a swirl of Benetton features. Dromgoole ultimately declared them — us — “doubtful and mysterious — and unclean.”

Almost 50 years later, a white sociologist, Everett Stonequist, turned his gaze on people of mixed ancestry, publishing an essay called “The Marginal Man,” in which he essentially declared such people to be damaged goods whose “contradictory” ancestry would always mingle uneasily, producing “an indefinable malaise.”

This disdain is embedded in the language we use; the word mulatto originates in the Spanish word for mule. We were named after the infertile offspring of a horse and a donkey, a spawn of two species that is unable to procreate. Historically, we were seen as either pathologically depressed sad sacks who could not pick a side or as tricksters, dangerously able to pass from one world to the other.

I have been accused of racial chicanery more than once. There was the time I met with a woman to discuss renting a room in her house. She was white, older than me, and we sat chatting warmly in her living room. At some point, she said I had an interesting face and asked what my background was. I told her that I was mixed: half-Black and half-white. Visibly flabbergasted, she rose and hauled a floor lamp over to where I was sitting and shone it brightly on my face. “I don’t see it,” she said, squinting down at my face. “It can’t be true. I don’t see it at all.”

Confusion was not the only emotion we saw on Mr. Trump’s face on the N.A.B.J. stage. We saw indignation, even rage. Vice President Harris’s racial illegibility was not the only thing that offended him. It was her claim of Blackness. His accusation suggested that claiming Blackness could only be for the purpose of cynical political maneuvering. The implication was that if we could be anything else — Indian, or white — why wouldn’t we?

Though I am younger than Ms. Harris by six years, in her Blackness, I recognize my own. It is a Blackness born not in slavery but much later, in a whole other context — in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, when there was no mixed-race category. You were either Black or white. To claim whiteness as a mixed child was to deny and hide Blackness. Our families understood that the world we were growing into would seek to denigrate this part of us, and we would need a community that was made up, always and already, of all shades of Blackness. The big secret I knew — and Ms. Harris surely knows it as well — is that our Blackness was born not out of something lost but something gained.

At a dinner party last summer, I sat next to a man who, like me, had a Black father and a white mother. He asked me if I had grown up identifying as Black. I told him yes. I sensed, even as I said it, that I’d wandered into a trap.

Indeed, I had barely finished my sentence when, with great excitement, he pointed at me and addressed the white man to his left. “See?” he said. “As I was explaining to you earlier, the slave mentality is still with us today.” He told his dinner companion that I was evidence of his point: The fact that a person as clearly diluted as me still identified as Black meant that we as a culture were still subscribing to the old one-drop rule.

I could feel the eyes of the other dinner guests — all white — on us, the cameras rolling. This episode of the show was called “Mulatto Against Mulatto.”

The man at the dinner party had mistaken my Blackness for something born of trauma and slavery and loss. He’d also turned race, in a strange way, back into a hard science of percentages. In his effort to dispel the one-drop rule, he’d created a new rule: the fifty-percent rule.

The truth we are always forgetting is that race has never been about science or math or blood quantum. Race is not real in the biological sense but is born of history, economics, memory, kinship, political alliance, culture and, perhaps especially, language. History forms and reforms meaning; context matters.

Declaring people like Ms. Harris not Black — even debating the truth of mixed people’s assertion that we are the ones who get to describe ourselves in all our complexity — is to once again reduce race to something mathematically quantifiable and to turn mixed-race people into specimens who must be lectured by others on what we truly are.

I could have explained all this to the woman holding the lamp over my face or to the post-racial Black man and the other guests at the dinner party. But both times, my words petered out. I had the racial specimen blues.

Instead, I told them what I will tell you now: If you know, you know. If you don’t, I can’t save you. Still, the show goes on.