In a new interview with the popular sports podcast, “All The Smoke,” Vice President Kamala Harris reacted to attacks on her racial identity that falsely questioned her Blackness.
When asked by co-host Matt Barnes, the former NBA player, who himself was born multiethnic with an Italian mother and Black father, about how she’s been misrepresented by former president Donald Trump, Harris, whose father is a Black Jamaican and mother was Indian, made it clear how silly the attacks appeared.
“You’ve always been secure in who you are but what do you think when you see people questioning the fabric of who you are?” Barnes said.
“One, I don’t listen to it. I’m really clear about who I am and if anybody else is not they need to go through their own level of therapy, that’s not my issue,” Harris said. “My mother was very clear; she was raising two Black girls to be two proud Black women. And it was never a question.”
The false questioning of Harris’ Blackness was amplified by former president Donald Trump, who was interviewed during the NABJ conference in August and used the stage to push a lie about how Harris identified.
During the “All the Smoke” interview, Harris went on to expand on why questions about being multiethnic or mixed race need to account for America’s complex history, with segregation connected to systems like the “one-drop rule,” that meant any person with even a single ancestor of African descent was considered Black and discriminated against by law.
“Over the years, journalists — some, not most, would want to talk about it and I’d say okay, if you wanna have this conversation, I’m prepared to have it but sit down and get comfortable for a few hours if you wanna start talking about race in America,” Harris said candidly, as Barnes and his co-host Stephen Jackson nodded in agreement.
“You wanna talk about the 1/8 rule? You wanna talk about what it means in terms of who you are perceived to be and the impact that can have on the rest of your life regardless of who you actually are in terms of your God-given capacity and the rights that you have and should have?”
Harris, an HBCU (historically Black college and university) alumna and graduate of Howard University, also spoke about the importance of HBCUs and why the Biden-Harris administration helped get $16 billion of funding invested in the schools.
“So a lot of my work, especially in the Senate and now as vice president, has been to increase federal funding to HBCUs. Because again, I know they are centers of academic excellence, they are centers of academic excellence, but don’t necessarily have the same kind of resources,” Harris explained.
“When I was senator, I was responsible for helping to get billions into upgrading, literally, the physical structure because they’re old. And I think, increasingly, to your point, more people are understanding — it’s like, we maybe skipped an era but we’re getting back to a place of more people understanding what our HBCUs do and giving more support financially to them. But, we have to.”
In the conversation, the vice president addressed her economic plan for America should she be elected president, and how she managed right-wing political attacks for being a stepmother.
To watch the full interview, visit the YouTube channel for “All the Smoke.”