The Hybrid American Future That Wasn’t

During his recent appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists, Donald Trump was asked by his host Rachel Scott about Republicans referring to Kamala Harris as a “DEI hire.” Did Trump believe Kamala was a “DEI hire,” Scott asked, and would he tell his fellow Republicans to “Stop it”?

It was a Chinese finger trap of a question. In response, Trump shrugged and said:

“I didn’t know she [Kamala] was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black. Now she wants to be known as … Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

The subsequent eruptions of laughter in the audience, with some smatterings of outrage, showed that Trump’s riposte hit home. After extemporizing through the rest of the interview, Trump padded off wearing his signature smirk, having deposited a massive turd into the punch bowl of contemporary identity politics: What ethnicity, exactly is Kamala Harris?

Questions about Kamala’s actual ethnicity and its importance have indeed been all over the map. “Watch Kamala Harris sworn in as first Indian American senator” was the headline chosen by the Sacramento Bee when they covered her swearing-in ceremony. The Associated Press announced her in similar fashion. The New York Times announced her as “The first woman and woman of color to serve as vice president.” That neither the word Black nor the term African American is mentioned continues to be fair game, at least among African Americans. A CNN anchor went to a Black barbershop in Pennsylvania to ask the loaded Kamala question to three locals. The man in the middle turned to his left and asked his neighbor.

Is Kamala Black? Yes or no?”

“I’ll let her speak on that, but to me, no,” his neighbor said cautiously.

“Wow!” his interlocutor reacted. He then turned to the man on the other side of him.

“How about you?”

“I share that same view,” the other concurred.

Michael Smerconish, the CNN host, was quick to add that Black callers had called in earlier to his radio show to assure him that these barbershop pundits were “low information voters.” The question of Kamala’s Blackness, in other words, was the domain of uninformed morons. Yet none other than Don Lemon has vehemently maintained that Jamaican American and African American are not commensurate, and thus Kamala Harris couldn’t fully claim Black identity, in a clip that has since become impossible to find.

Time will tell if Trump’s gambit at the NABJ was a shambolic error or a masterfully calculated time bomb. What it already has done, however, is raise a specter that has haunted American race politics since the very beginning: hybridity. Her father is a Jamaican professor of economics, and her mother was a South Asian biomedical researcher. Her father also claims descent from Jamaican plantation and slave owner Hamilton Brown, originally from County Antrim in Ireland—a claim verified by Irish genealogist Stephen McCracken, but which has been vigorously contested by other genealogists.

Whatever the intricacies of her father’s Irish Jamaican heritage, Harris herself is clearly a hybrid—a category that includes tens of millions of Americans, but which appears nowhere on U.S. Census forms and is regularly negated by the racialist identitarian language favored both by dyed-in-the-wool American racists—however many of them there are—and by the far larger numbers of Americans who have adopted liberal or progressive shibboleths about our “racial identities” since the turn of the century.

Reality, however, is often at odds with America’s renewed affection for the infamous “one drop rule,” an invention of 19th-century Jim Crow that has made a startling comeback in the 21st century.

Harris’ parents divorced when she was 7, after which she lived largely with her mother. She led an itinerant childhood guided by her mother’s work and spent the majority of her youth in Montreal, making her at least tricultural—Indian, Jamaican, and French Canadian. Yet she also attended Westmount High School, an Anglophone enclave of upper-middle-class privilege in a largely Francophone city. For her undergraduate degree, she attended Howard University, a historically Black college, and belonged to one of the nation’s oldest Black sororities. She went on to receive her law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of Law. She then served as district attorney of San Francisco, attorney general of California, senator, and now as vice president of the United States. She is married to second gentleman Doug Emhoff, a successful Jewish lawyer, and is stepmother to his children—at least some of whom do not identify as Jewish (their mother was not Jewish but Swedish).

All told, then, we have a sprawling, racial and culturally rich American story, tying in African, South Asian, Caribbean, Jewish, and Caucasian threads into one hybrid tangle worthy of Toni Morrison or Maxine Hong Kingston or maybe even V.S. Naipaul or Saul Bellow. But does any of it matter?

Ethnicity and geography aside, Kamala Harris is the product of coastal elites, the daughter of a professor father and biologist mother, groomed in the political machinery of San Francisco, that glittering enclave of left-coast progressivism that is the domain of Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Gavin Newsom. She is the heir apparent of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, and she appears closer to the presidency than ever, in large part thanks to the patronage of the party’s presiding genius, Barack Obama—who is said both to have put Harris on the ticket in 2020, and also to have removed Biden from the ticket in 2024, clearing the way for Harris to become president.

Obama’s own public appraisals of Harris make no mention of either her Blackness or her Indianness. “You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant, and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake,” he remarked once, when introducing his fellow politician of racially hybrid, multinational descent. “She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country.”

As it happens, I know something about Obama’s affinity for people with hybrid backgrounds, and also the descriptive and practical difficulties that those backgrounds can cause.

From about 1986 to 1990, my sister Sheila Miyoshi Jager dated Barack Obama. They were both in their early to mid 20s. Their relationship was a stormy one, as chronicled by historian David J. Garrow, marked by Obama’s shift from aspiring writer to community organizer to politician.

I remember Obama as a younger version of the genial, measured, often inscrutable man who ascended to the presidency. He was tall, gregarious, athletic. His open, ready smile was already there, which carried with it a quality of “eternal reassurance.” I called it the Gatsby smile.

The Obama who visited our family home in Santa Rosa had no political ambitions in the time that I knew him. That he was Black seemed of no great importance to anyone in my family, as my father had spent several years of his early 20s in the Congo, where he worked with Albert Schweitzer. We were a meritocratic family, and a multiracial one. If his race was ever mentioned, I don’t remember it.

Given that I was the kid brother of his girlfriend, I obviously didn’t hold a lot of interest to Barry, as we called him. When we spoke on occasion, I found him exceptionally well-informed, funny, and personable. He appeared to be a globe-trotting intellectual bohemian and academic. One Christmas visit had him expressing his wish to join the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. His knowledge of the contemporary American short story was encyclopedic.

That Obama and my sister would find each other is not hard to understand. Both were preternaturally bright, ambitious, and attractive. They are also both hybrids with odd itinerant backgrounds. Obama with his European mother and Kenyan father, was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. My sister, with our Japanese mother and Dutch father, was raised in California and also in Europe. They were both outsiders, both culturally and racially, which made them particularly contemporary and compatible.

One of the problems of racial hybridity is that it does not necessarily spare you the indignities of racism. Santa Rosa, where my sister and I grew up, is nestled 50 miles north of San Francisco, and also Oakland where Kamala Harris was born. It boasted a population of 70,000 when I was a child, and still harbored the same kind of casual racism that was endemic in the America of the 1970s and 1980s. Due to California’s history, acceptance of Hispanics was perhaps more ingrained, and our most popular star athlete was African American. Still, from elementary school onward, I was subjected to a steady litany of racist insults, as I believe my sister was. Eye-pulling, chop-socky noises, screwed-up squinty-eye overbite faces, done in the manner of Mickey Rooney from Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Endlessly.

I was also made to stop for performative chants about my hybridity. Students came up to me and pushed their eyes upward saying “My daddy is Chinese,” then downward to say “My mommy is Japanese.” They then skewed the corners of both eyes in opposite directions saying “Look how I turned out.” My next door neighbor and occasional playmate—he’s now a stockbroker—enjoyed calling my mother, Shinko, “Shink the chink.” This gradually devolved into a sort of subtle but no less vicious ostracism that persisted throughout high school.

Our parents were stubbornly blind to it all. They remained wildly idealistic about ‘melting pot America’, even though racial miscegenation laws had made it illegal for them to marry anywhere on the West Coast except San Francisco, in 1960. Raised in the European model of education, they couldn’t fathom the type of lax, unsupervised behavior that was allowed in American schools, and were further astonished at the mini-adult social rituals of tweens and teenagers. The role of education, in their view, was to refine students inexorably into obedience and excellence under the stern heel of a teacher, hopefully in Prussian or Japanese style. To their mind, I should have spent my high school years wearing short pants and clicking my heels. As war survivors, they also thought we should keep our heads down and count our blessings.

My sister and I lived out our long social and racial exile alone, in other worlds. Our parents, who would conduct seminars on European literature and the classics over our breakfast table, thought the antics of our peers were best left ignored. Meanwhile, my sister was socially ostracized to the point that she generally ate lunch alone or at the special needs table. It all left me with the impression that my difference, ambiguous as it was, was indelible. I would always be out of the running, a stain on the social fabric.

Obama has been reticent about the racist incidents from his childhood, which may have been fewer—given that Hawaii is one of the most multiracial and hybrid states in America, though being a half American white and half Kenyan child with an Indonesian stepfather in Jakarta can’t have been easy. I do remember one story from my sister, though.

One night, walking home to their shared Chicago apartment, a lone white woman took notice of Obama approaching. She scurried over to the opposite side of the street, dove quickly into her parked car with a look of alarm, and locked the door. According to Sheila, Obama loped over calmly, knocked politely on the driver’s side window, placed both hands on the side of his face, waggled his fingers and stuck his tongue out at her. Sheila remembers laughing. She never told me what the woman’s reaction was.

All of which to say that while Jim Crow is largely gone, racism—like antisemitism—continues to be a festering wound in American society. We should be past it, yet we are not. It should not be a sticking point, and yet it continues to be. For those of us who are at the receiving end of it, it encourages, as W.E.B. Du Bois once pointed out, a divided consciousness. You become hypervigilantly sensitized to the irrational judgments of other people—a fact that might explain, among other things, my affinity for Jews, and for other people whose difference is not absolutely apparent yet continuously felt.

As a hybrid person, my mixed race is less of a visible imprint and more of a floating signifier. I have been mistaken for Hawaiian, Mongolian, Serb, Italian, Korean—and, landing in Montreal with long black hair—Native American. Obama and my sister experienced the same indeterminacy. Kamala Harris has no doubt experienced something similar. Most often my hybridity results in a question I’ve heard more times than I can remember:

“So … what are you?”

In high school, I held out hope for a completely different world. Post punk, new wave and American hardcore were making inroads into the Bay Area. My little coterie of outcasts, who had reluctantly allowed me on their periphery, were militantly antilabel. On the few occasions I was allowed to leave the house, our destination was always the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which gleefully subjected the Ken and Barbie squares Brad and Janet to the outrageous gender-bending attentions of Dr. Frank-N-Furter and his castle full of freaks. Weird was in, and the point of weird was that there was no defining it. The same with the comic grotesqueries of John Waters. We watched his cast of misfits twist the old social norms into corkscrews and laughed.

Though we would never fully articulate it, our worldview was strictly postidentarian. Hybridity, was, in fact, a selling point. If any high school student from this group were asked to identify themselves racially or sexually, the most common answer would be “none of your fucking business.” In our secondhand clothing, DIY haircuts, and shoes slathered with housepaint, everything was done for theatricality and identity was strictly up for grabs. If the musicians and artists we loved were racially or sexually ambiguous, it was entirely their business. This was long before the age of the demi-sexual bi romantic wolfkin with a generalized anxiety disorder.

This is the cultural milieu that my sister and Obama were also swimming in, though in the grim hyperacademic grind house of the University of Chicago, it would have been muted. In the 1980s, with their cosmopolitanism, academic credentials, and multiracial and cultural bona fides, they should have been king and queen of the United Colors of Benneton ball. They were the wedding cake couple of multiculturalism par excellence, and the possibility of their marriage was floated more than a few times during their nearly five-year relationship. When Obama began his steep ascent to the presidency, my sister should have been a perfect candidate for first lady.

Yet it did not happen. Why?

David J. Garrow maintained in his biography of Obama that fault lines emerged in their relationship when they attended an exhibit about the trial of Adolf Eichmann at Chicago’s Spertus Institute. Specifically, and according to her statements to Garrow, Sheila was irked by Obama’s failure to condemn the outrageous antisemitic remarks of a Chicago mayoral aide named Steve Cokely, who had maintained, among other things, that Jewish doctors had deliberately infected African American babies with AIDS in an attempt at genocide.

This fight was certainly one of the final conflicts in their admittedly stormy relationship. Yet I had always heard another breakup story, which starts when Obama was personally invited by Jesse Jackson, Chicago’s African American political kingmaker, to attend a political event for his Rainbow/PUSH coalition. It was apparently a swanky event, a milestone in Obama’s early political career. According to my source, my sister was overjoyed by the news, which marked a major turn toward Obama’s political future. “That’s fantastic. What am I going to wear?” she allegedly asked.

At which point Obama, in a moment of unguarded candor, leveled his eyes at her and said “I can’t take you …”

It may have been less a callous rejection than a sinking realization on his part. Obama is anything if not astute. He must have understood, profoundly, that the political calculus of his moment, and his dawning acceptance into the upper echelons of Black Chicago politics, meant that he had to bring an African American date to the event. The relationship between my sister and Obama went into an extended death spiral after this, whereupon the young Michelle Obama entered the picture. As far as political calculations went, the new relationship was a win.

Is the breakup story true? Who knows. Regardless, it speaks to a contradiction at the heart of identity politics that has come back to haunt us all.

In the final account, Obama and Harris are politicians, and politicians are ultimately beholden to the entrenched structures of American society and politics. Ideally, race should not have mattered in Obama’s personal life or his political career. But ideals don’t grease political wheels, nor do they necessarily feed the needs of the donor class or the Washington political machinery, or make it easier to lead one’s personal life.

Obama’s decision to part with Sheila, to essentially identify as Black rather than multiracial, marks a turning point in American politics whose repercussions are still being felt to this day. Part of it was the uphill battle of dealing with old school racial binaries as the “first” Black American president, where his racial identity became a focal point for both Black and white Americans. To Obama’s credit, it was not a huge focal point, and he remained nimbly evasive, even as it led to all manner of excess and speculation, mind-bogglingly gauche and stupid comments from public figures of all stripes, and the particularly ignominious phenomenon of birtherism, with which Donald J. Trump gained entry to the national political scene.

Yet the arrival of Obama, who was moderate enough to serve two terms in the White House, nonetheless ushered in a new political vanguard whose ideals are about as far from old school liberal ideas on race as they are from the views of MAGA populists. Whether Obama’s public centrism masked a different agenda, or whether his presidency naturally attracted radicals to his party, is a question for political historians to sort out. Nonetheless, Obama oversaw the passing of the baton from the old school machine liberalism of Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden to the progressive left wing of the current party, which is now led by Kamala Harris.

This is where the question of Kamala Harris’ identity becomes fractious. Super progressive ideas around race seem more intent on balkanizing and fragmenting subsets of racial identity, eschewing older liberal ideals of integration or civic unity. Many of the current progressive ideas surrounding race are rooted in a deep suspicion and hostility to the old liberal order. The sins of our colonial forebears are so egregious, the racial trauma so deep, the old boy network so deeply entrenched, that it is sophistry to suggest that any valuable work can be done under the old order. If there is justice to be meted out in the racial arena, it is in helping minority groups recover from the epigenetic traumas of colonialism and racism and restoring their dignity, and rewiring old institutions according to new ideas of justice.

This utopian dream, as always, calls for the placement of a new framework in its place that will guarantee equality of outcomes—a goal whose history isn’t terribly promising, but which has swept through our institutions and radically altered what they teach and how they function. The statement “Anyone can make it if they try in America” is simply a reminder that our racist taskmasters are keeping the oppressed hypnotized with the hollow pipe dream of capitalist success in order to perpetuate white American injustice. Fair competition is a lie. Equity must therefore replace equality. During Biden’s presidential campaign, Kamala Harris voiced an ad which claimed that without artificially leveling the playing field for minorities and the underclass, equality will remain out of reach.

In such a framework, the classically liberal formulations of universal equality are anathema. To say “all lives matter” is to erase Black lives. Race is elevated to an intrinsic, some would say essentialist level. It is a deeply personal, traumatic, complex, even holy thing, only to be addressed by those who have suffered under its stigma. White folks need only stay silent and witness what they have wrought through appropriate shows of guilt. Race is thus the centerpiece of the progressive canon, an indelible component of social identity that, despite its demonstrable fluidity and complexity, is not for outsiders to speak of.

It is therefore no accident that DEI was the focus of Rachel Scott’s question to Trump last month. To suggest that diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring puts racial diversity over competency is, according to progressive orthodoxy, inherently racist. It’s also a hot button issue for Harris, who is no doubt extremely competent in many areas but unfortunately comes off from time to time as a ditzy San Francisco wine mom.

Race matters to Harris’ progressive base, and how she presents herself in racial terms therefore matters. It matters more to certain parts of her progressive base, in fact, than it does to most Americans who identify as liberal, who see America as a hard-won multiracial society, however imperfect, and are more directly concerned with jobs, inflation, health care, and other questions that have a more obvious impact on their well-being. Kamala’s identity also matters to historically Black communities who, understandably, act as gatekeepers for those who claim African American identity. As the Pennsylvania barbershop patrons recently showed, it’s not as straightforward as the media claims it is.

There was nothing particularly woke about the Obama I knew. If anything, he believed strongly in New Deal principles, namely that government safeguards could and should be installed to preserve the dignity and well-being of the most vulnerable members of society. He believed, or at least claimed to believe, in fiscal responsibility and pragmatism. His biggest policy legacy is most likely Obamacare, which was a relatively centrist program, if not entirely sensible or successful. Obama was surprisingly cagey and mostly silent when it came to speaking on racial issues. The only exception was his incisive, 20-minute speech after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. In it, he calmly addressed the experience of being Black in America, and why the acquittal was so painful for Black Americans.

Yet one thing is clear: Since Obama’s presidency, for all its rootedness in the ideal of a postracial America, racial tensions have markedly intensified. The divisions that seemed to be easing into a new pluralism at the time Obama dated my sister have now been replaced with an increasingly tense polarization. The progressive left swears that this is solely the working of MAGA populism, which they frame as a sinister return of old school white racist nationalism, if not outright fascism. Trump and his followers are deplorable racists—their avowed big-tent colorblindness necessarily being the cover for neo-Nazis and other outright racists who seek to restore the Jim Crow laws of the Old South. Only the progressive wing’s increasingly fragile and splintering views on race and identity, which more than a few argue have spiralled into incoherence, holds out hope for our future.

Despite these arguments, it is hard to avoid the sense that some large part of the polarization that exists is the direct product of the progressive strategy of reemphasizing racial binaries and putting race first in every area of our country’s social, cultural, and institutional life.

In the meantime, the Democratic Party machine and party faithful in the media are scrambling to frame Kamala not as an ambitious racial chameleon but a sincerely misunderstood Black woman who attended a historically Black college and has of course mentioned her South Asian heritage from time to time.

Will it work? Only time will tell. The racial litmus tests she will have to undergo, from both her supporters and critics, may be more trying than the one our first Black president had to endure. Whatever happens, this continued stoking of our country’s racial obsession is a clear step backward.