If Kamala Harris' Father is part White & part Jamaican African and her Mother is Asian-Indian then is she really Black?
Is Joe Biden's running mate really Black?
If Kamala Harris' father is part white and part Jamaican African and her mother is Asian-Indian then is she really Black?
Reason.com tries to figure it out:
Kamala Harris, Joe Biden's pick to be the Democratic Party's vice-presidential nominee, is the daughter of an Indian immigrant mother and a Jamaican immigrant father. Her father, as I understand it, has ancestors of both European and African origin. [Welcome new Volokh readers. FYI, I've been working on a book on the American Law of Race, with this forthcoming article the first relevant output. My own opinion is that Ms. Harris should be deemed American, period, but there is no such box on government forms, and if you decline to state your race, someone will decide for you…
First things first. There is no multiracial or mixed-race category in American law in any jurisdiction. Nor is there an Indian category. So Harris cannot be legally Indian, nor can she be legally "both."
Indians once had their own census category and at other times were considered legally white. These day, however, they are now firmly in the Asian category. African American or black is defined as anyone with origins in the black races of Africa, so she qualifies as African American as well, even if her father is mostly European genetically, and even though he is an immigrant, not a descendant of American slaves...
... I've misplaced the citation, but I recall that other federal guidelines state that if a person checks black/African American and another box, she is deemed African American for statistical purposes.
In short, under American law, no one could deny Harris's right to assert that she is half-Indian and less-than-half of African ancestry, but so long as she considers herself, and is considered by others, to be African American, for legal purposes she is black. The major exception would be if she filed a discrimination complaint based on her Asian ancestry. In that case, she would be considered considered legally Asian for purposes of resolving the complain. What, at least at this point, she cannot be is legally Indian, legally mixed-race, or legally no race at all. [https://reason.com/2020/08/11/is-kamala-harris-legally-african-american-indian-both-neither-or-something-else/]
Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Mass and the Church as well as for the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
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