Kamala Harris recently made an appearance on the All The Smoke podcast and had a candid conversation with former NBA ballers, Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes.
Vice President Kamala Harris spoke out against attacks on her racial identity that wrongly questioned her Black heritage.
In the interview with co-host Matt Barnes, a former NBA player who is of mixed race, Harris was asked about the false claims made by former President Donald Trump. With a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, she highlighted how ridiculous these attacks were. “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.”
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The false questioning of Harris’ racial identity was heightened by former President Donald Trump, who used his appearance at the NABJ conference in August to promote a misleading narrative about her.
In the “All the Smoke” interview, Harris elaborated on the importance of recognizing America’s complex history when discussing multiethnic or mixed-race identities. She pointed out that segregationist practices, such as the “one-drop rule,” classified anyone with even one ancestor of African descent as Black, leading to legal discrimination against them.
“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 stated. “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, a graduate of Howard University and an alumna of a historically Black college and university (HBCU), also discussed the significance of HBCUs and explained how the Biden-Harris administration secured $16 billion in funding for these institutions.
“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.”
