After Donald Trump told journalists on Wednesday that his presidential opponent Kamala Harris “turned Black” for political gain, Trump’s comments have impacted the way many multirace voters are thinking about the two candidates.
“She was only promoting Indian heritage,” the former president said during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week. “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.”
“Is she Indian or is she Black?” he asked.
She’s both.
Harris, whose mother was Indian and her father is Jamaican, would make history if she is elected president. She would be both the first female president and the first Asian American president.
Multiracial American voters say they have heard similar derogatory remarks about their identities their whole lives. Some identify with Harris’ politics more than others but, overall, they told NBC News that Trump’s comments will not go unnoticed.
And then you also get a bunch of white people (like me until a few years ago) who think it’s a point of pride they are 1/16th Cherokee without realizing it likely means their great great grandmother was raped by a white guy. My great great grandparents were married, but I have no idea whether it was a forced marriage by him stealing her or if it was a love marriage.
i always felt that the cherokee great great grandma thing was a nicer/kinder american version of the mexican thing.
dna tests have confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the european contribution to modern mexicans is extremely minimal and very concentrated in the few places where it becomes statistically significant enough to measure, but the popular cultural consensus minimizes native contribution; meaning that the great great grandma raping was at such a hugely pervasive scale that it literally created countries all throughout latin america full of people that have actively chosen to forget about all the great great grandma rape.
i used to think that it was a crazy one-off occurrence from a century ago and that any sane person today would never cooperate with that kind of groupthink in the modern day; but hearing people on lemmyverse and reddit minimizing an active genocide is merely a “privileged single issue voter perspective” and i think i’m starting to understand how that great great cherokee grandma story came into existence.
Most people who claim they are 1/16th or 1/32nd native are not at all. It is a very popular family myth. My mom told me that her mother said her great grandmother was native. I viewed that as possible since my grandmother was an orphan. I did 23andme and there is no native American. I also went through ancestry.com to build out my family tree and indeed there was no native American in there. The 60s and 70s were a period of growing acknowledgement of Native communities and I feel like that was kind of a way that people made it seem like they were at least nominally supportive.
Or it was just one of the batty things about my grandmother. Orphanages back then were simply work houses. You did school for a little bit and then went to work manufacturing. The discipline must have been pretty strict considering one of the teachers beat her so bad that she lost an eye.
I’ve seen pictures of my great great grandma and have spent time hanging out with my (half or full, can’t remember anymore) Cherokee cousins, so I know my case isn’t a family myth. But I have basically no connection to Native Americans outside of a couple weekends spent at my great grandma’s house when I was a young kid, so I no longer claim any connection on the chance the family didn’t have the happiest start.