Harris has said she does not spend a lot of time focusing on how to categorize herself, telling The Washington Post that “when I first ran for office that was one of the things that I struggled with, which is that you are forced through that process to define yourself in a way that you fit neatly into the compartment that other people have created. My point was: I am who I am. I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it.”
This was in February 2019, during Harris’s first campaign for president, when the political and media classes were engaged in asinine inquisitions of Harris’s Blackness. That same month, in an interview on The Breakfast Club podcast, host Charlamagne tha God asked Harris to comment on social media memes that denied her Blackness—such as, in his words, “Kamala Harris is not African American. Her parents were immigrants from India and Jamaica.”
“This is the same thing they did to Barack,” Harris said, truthfully. “This is not new to us.” When Charlamagne, who is Black, asked Harris to respond to those who cast doubts about the “legitimacy of her Blackness,” she said, “I think they don’t understand who Black people are.” Toward the end of the interview, she avowed her Blackness: “I’m Black, I am Black, and I am proud of it.… I was born Black, and I’ll die Black, and I am proud of it. And I am not going to make any excuses for it, for anybody.…”
