"I didn't know she was Black": Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and skin-color racism

Ten presidential campaigns ago, in 1984, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was almost universally described by media and politicians as the first Black man to run a serious major-party campaign for president, also ran a parallel campaign — against being identified by his skin color. Jackson was among the first major public figures to identify himself as “African-American” rather than "black," and for the next few decades, many among media people, politicians and the public followed suit, adopting that term. America seemed poised to end one of its ugliest features: identifying its people by the color of their skin.

This current presidential campaign suggests that history has regressed, if anything, since Jackson’s days in the limelight. Now 82, he was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

With Donald Trump’s ritual degradation of his opponents for any and all reasons, America's skin-color obsession has hit a new low point — and Trump's attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris have just started.

Almost everyone reading this already knows what Trump said last week about Harris, who will address the Democratic National Convention this coming week as its presidential nominee: “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. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

As if determined to add insult to injury, Trump added: “I love the Black population of this country. I’ve done so much for the Black population of this country,” before insisting, “I have been the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”

Back in 1983, before his historic presidential campaign, Jesse Jackson addressed a joint session of the Alabama Legislature, saying that he thought it was "about time we forgot about black and white and started talking about employed and unemployed.”

He said later that he had been intrigued by media coverage referring to him as the first “black” or “Negro” to address Alabama's lawmakers since Reconstruction. Facing “the ocean of white faces” listening to him in the chamber, he wondered why it was that Black people let white people identify them, rather than identifying themselves. At that point, he still believed that “black,” a one-syllable English word denoting a color, should be the preferred identification.

A year later, when launching his campaign for the Democratic nomination — ultimately won by Walter Mondale, who would then suffer one of the worst landslide defeats in political history — Jackson announced he had decided to start a national debate on the subject. By the time of Jackson's second campaign, in 1988, he addressed a group of leaders who had gathered in Chicago to discuss what they called a “new national black agenda.” He forcefully worked to convince them to drop "black” in favor of “African” or "African-American."

“Black does not describe our situation," Jackson said. "We are of African-American heritage. To be called black is baseless.” This new term, he argued, possessed “cultural integrity” and would put those Americans who embraced it in their “proper historical context.”

“Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base," Jackson continued. "There are Armenian Americans and Jewish Americans and Arab Americans and Italian Americans.” Such hyphenated Americans, he said, felt a “degree of accepted and reasonable pride,” and had succeeded in connecting “their heritage to their mother country” and also to “where they are now” in America.

"Black," he insisted, was both inadequate and inaccurate. “In my household, there are seven people, and none of us have the same complexion," Jackson said. "We are of African-American heritage.”

Jackson often spoke about the fact that his campaign on terminology was not easy. Some Black people wanted to continue defining themselves that way and, more importantly, the U.S. government, had promoted the term “black” for decades, through the census and other demographic statistics. In the 1970 census, the choices included “Negro or Black.” In 1990, the category “Other” included a write-in field that could be either “black-white” or “white-black.” Only in 2000 was the choice of “Black or African American" officially offered.

By that time, "African American" had become rooted in the media, in politics, and among the general public. According to a 1991 study in Political Science Quarterly, an organ of the Academy of Political Science, “many of the largest black-oriented newspaper and radio stations in major markets adopted the change" to "African American," and editorials and columnists in major newspapers "approved the new phrase.”

In 1989, the study reported, the Washington Post had used “African-American” 96 times in quotations, 95 times in titles and 119 times in editorials and letters. Over the following three decades, use of the phrase increased significantly, particularly during Barack Obama's administration — although Obama himself preferred to be described as “Black,” perhaps an early indicator of the change ahead.

Both terms were widely used throughout the 2010s, but the Black Lives Matter movement, emerging in response to police violence, clearly shifted the dynamic. In 2020 came the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, and Black Lives Matter became a controversial nationwide phenomenon.

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It was obviously no coincidence that the Washington Post declared that year that it would now “uppercase the B in Black to identify the many groups that make up the African diaspora in America and elsewhere,” a statement of obvious and puzzling ambiguity. The Post added that it recognized "there are individuals who prefer not to confine themselves to identity based solely on the color of their skin" and that "people will have the opportunity to identify” themselves however they wish in their own words — but not in news coverage. 

The New York Times also started capitalizing "Black," and most other media organizations, including Salon, followed suit. The Times statement included the cynical recommendation of "Black" as “an accurate description of race.” At least the Associated Press was more matter-of-fact, simply saying it would capitalize “Black” only "in a racial, ethnic or cultural sense …  lowercase black is a color, not a person.”

The net effect is that “African American” has been largely abandoned and “Black” has been reinforced like never before.

While the intentions may be benevolent, one thing remains the same: Throughout the history of race in America, the white majority seems to decide how to identify others. Donald Trump is not the only person reinforcing this racist impulse.

For Jesse Jackson, it must be a time of conflicted feelings: He sees a Black woman running for president, with a real chance of winning, and he sees his campaign to replace that term conclusively defeated.