Yes. Obviously.

Although, if we want to be pedantic about it, it’s less clear that she’s African American. In the US, “Black” is split into two groups: Black African and Black Caribbean. Harris is mixed race—Indian on her mother’s side, and Jamaican on her father’s side—which would classify her as Black Caribbean.

Granted, the reason there are Black people in the Caribbean was because they were taken there in the slave trade from Africa, and another term for it is “African Caribbean”, so personally I’m not calling out any Black Caribbean people who identify as African American. And plenty of people in the US use “Black” and “African American” synonymously, rather than a term that denotes a different category of people.

Case in point, Wikipedia currently describes Kamala Harris as the first African American Vice-President, while citing a White House page that only describes her as Black American. Can we trust any secondary sources, when secondary sources are so inattentive to the distinction? What if we asked her directly? In one interview, Harris was asked if she was African American, and she said she’s Black–a response that silently respects the distinction without drawing attention to it.

Why the distinction does and doesn’t matter

When so many sources ignore the distinction, does the distinction meaningfully exist at all? Race is socially constructed after all, and if people entirely forgot about a racial distinction then that distinction would cease to exist.

But I think this distinction will stick around.  For one thing, “African American” is American terminology, and obviously doesn’t make sense in, say, the UK.  And you can find many articles from Black perspectives explaining the distinction between African American and Black.

Most Black Americans can be traced back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade which, besides being bad for the obvious reasons, also cut them off from their African cultural heritage. That they have African ancestry is obvious, but they lose connection to anything more specific.

However, some Black Americans are more recent voluntary immigrants, such as Barack Obama’s Kenyan father, or Kamala Harris’s Jamaican father. Usually, voluntary immigrants maintain a stronger connection to their culture of origin. So in the immigrant context, calling people African may be rather reductive. Africa is a very big place! And it’s particularly reductive for people who immigrated from the Caribbean, which is not even in Africa.

Nonetheless, Black immigrants to the US must deal with not just how they perceive themselves, but how other people perceive them. We perceive them as Black. This is what the distinction between ethnicity and race is often trying to get at. We have our ethnic heritage—which may not be immediately obvious to an external observer—and then we have our race, a socially constructed classification that we simply know and perceive.

Conservative lies

Recently, Donald Trump made a false claim that Kamala Harris only recently “turned” Black, in an interview in front of the National Association of Black Journalists.

I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black.

I was curious how conservative news sources would spin this, and whether any of them would bring up pedantry about “African American” vs “Black”. My expectation was disconfirmed–I didn’t find any news sources talking about it.

However, I found a Daily Show clip from 2020, which includes conservatives argue she isn’t African American because she’s Jamaican.  On the one hand, they’re being pedantic by denying that Harris is African-American. And on the other, they’re being conveniently unpedantic, by failing to acknowledge that she is nonetheless still Black.

The underlying conservative logic, is that Black people will vote for Harris because she’s Black. Therefore the tactic is to call Harris’ Blackness into question. But since Harris really is Black, the only way they can question it is with lies and bullshit.

Finding the grain of truth

But I’m not going to try to argue the complete opposite. I think it’s a form of condescension to suppose that Black people will vote for candidates solely because they’re Black, to the exclusion of all considerations. One would hope that a Black candidate is aware and sympathetic to Black American issues at the policy level, but the truth is that no single individual can represent all of Black American experience, as varied as it is.

To be more blunt, presidential candidates certainly tend to be drawn from a more privileged crowd—and so POC candidates tend to be drawn from the more privileged subgroups of POC. Is it a coincidence that both Barack and Harris come from immigrant backgrounds? I don’t think so. In a process called “brain drain”, certain immigrants tend to be relatively wealthy and educated, because those are the people with the greatest resources to immigrate. These immigrants may still deal with racism that hurts their standing relative to similarly wealthy and educated White citizens, but benefit from class privilege relative to others of the same race.

Brain drain can be seen from a cursory glance at either of Kamala Harris’s parents. Her mother moved to the US to work on her Masters. Her father, while descended from Jamaican slaves, moved to the US to work on his PhD. And what can we expect? Quite reasonably, we want our presidents to be well-educated, and so they come from educated backgrounds.

So, I would like to acknowledge the space for nuance.  Just be careful not to abuse it.

When I searched for perspectives on why Kamala Harris’ experience may be different, what I found was the ADOS (American Descendants of Slavery) movement from 2019.  It was controversial, to put it lightly.  ADOS was accused of xenophobia, anti-immigration advocacy, and being a tool of conservatives.  Also, Kamala Harris is literally an American descendant of slavery, so what are they even talking about?  Gosh, when I acknowledge space for nuance, I don’t mean I support that.

I’m mixed White/Asian American, and I also come from an immigrant “brain drain” background.  I’m not voting for Harris because she’s Asian or mixed race. That’s just a nice to have. I’m voting for her because she’s not the fascist.

So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?
-Trump

Both. Go to hell, Trump.