Kamala Harris’ Racial and Cultural Firsts Were Onstage Throughout the Democratic Convention

Vice President Kamala Harris, on the night she became the first woman of Black and South Asian heritage to be a major party’s presidential nominee, didn’t explicitly mention the racial and gender firsts she would set if elected to the White House.

Instead, she opted for direct mentions of her multiracial background and upbringing. She paid tribute to her roots as the daughter of a brown woman and Caribbean man. She honored the multicultural village of “aunties” and “uncles” in California’s Bay Area. And following her speech, the relatives who joined her onstage for the traditional balloon drop included people of different and often multiple, overlapping races, like Harris herself. Western attire and saris were worn side by side.

It was a way for Harris and others at the convention to display her personal story while offering a visual political message that could appeal to a broad swath of people who see themselves in families like hers. Around 12.5% of U.S. residents identified as two or more races in 2022, up from 3% a decade earlier, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s most comprehensive survey of American life.

The United States is a nation that enslaved African Americans for centuries, then enforced legal, economic and social apartheid for a century more, and once denied equal representation to Black Americans at political party conventions. The nation’s immigration system long held explicit racial preferences for white immigrants. It denied voting rights to women until a century ago.

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During the convention roll call, in which delegates pledged votes to nominate Harris, some speakers announced the vice president’s middle name, Devi, as nod to her South Asian heritage.

Several speakers proudly noted Harris’ race. {snip}

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Comedian D.L. Hughley, speaking before Harris on Thursday, went after Trump’s suggestion that Harris had once downplayed being Black despite going to historically Black Howard University and often talking about her African American heritage in her early political career.

“Kamala has been Black longer than Trump has been a Republican,” he quipped.

As he walked off the stage, Hughley displayed a hand signal common among members of Omega Psi Phi, a historically Black fraternity. It was also a nod to Harris’ membership in the historically Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Inc., both part of the Divine Nine greek letter organizations with college and graduate chapters all over the country.

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Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, was born and raised in Oakland, California, a working-class town and once-thriving African American enclave known as a birthplace of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

“My mother was a brilliant, five-foot-tall, brown woman with an accent, and as the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her,” Harris said. {snip}

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At the beginning of the convention’s closing night program, Harris’ voice was heard in a biographical video played to delegates about the vice president and her sister’s upbringing. Their Indian mother, the vice president explained, raised her daughters as Black because she felt that was how the world would see them first.

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Pat Pullar, a delegate from Clayton County, Georgia, said witnessing Harris make history was something she wanted to experience “before I leave this earth.”

“It is like my ancestors are dancing,” she said Wednesday.