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.

Those issues weren't far from the minds of many inside the Chicago arena. Many in the audience wore white in homage to the suffrage movement.

Harris' heritage was made an issue by her opponents

Former President Donald Trump, Harris' Republican opponent, has questioned her Black heritage and falsely suggested to a gathering of Black journalists that she changed how she presented her racial roots when convenient. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump's running mate, calls Harris a “chameleon," which his allies argue is a reference to her shifts on policy, and has suggested she adopts a “fake Southern accent."

“I think the thing that we cannot forget is oftentimes these pendulum swings that we see, the word that continues to force the pendulum swing is race,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said in an interview.

Moore, who addressed the convention on Wednesday, said the country has gone “through fits and starts” with conversations about diversity and racial progress since its founding.

“That’s the underlying issue that I think we still very much wrestle with as a society,” he said later.

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. Civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton, president and CEO of the National Action Network, noted that Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress who then ran for president in 1972, would be proud of Harris' accomplishment.

“I know she's watching us tonight, as a Black woman stands up to accept the nomination for president of the United States,” Sharpton said.

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.

Harris spoke directly about her roots

Barack Obama, when he became the first Black man to accept a Democratic nomination in 2008, mentioned his Kenyan father and Kansan mother. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, told the 2016 convention that they had “reached a milestone in our nation’s march toward a more perfect union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for President.”

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. "But my mother never lost her cool.”

She added: “She taught us to never complain about injustice but to do something about it. And she also told us to never do something ‘half-assed.’ And that is a direct quote.”

Although her mother and father’s marriage was short-lived, she said, her father always encouraged her to take risks. “Run Kamala! Run! Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you,” Harris said.

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.

DNC watchers welcomed Harris' historic moment

Harris has maintained close ties to Howard, her alma mater, and to her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.

Many of her “sorors” — how members of Alpha Kappa Alpha refer to each other — and fellow Divine Nine members were watching in Chicago, as well as in her native San Francisco Bay Area.

Shannon Nash traveled from the Bay Area to Chicago because it was “important to be here to really witness history.”

“The last two weeks have been energetic, hopeful, joyful and just to be a part of this movement,” said Nash, co-founder of the group Tech for Kamala and a member of the AKA sorority. “To be able to tell my grandkids I was here when it happened is just super important.”

Nash, who is Black, said she has older relatives who saw Harris become the vice president. But some, like her late grandmother, would have loved to see the first Black woman accept a presidential nomination.

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.

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Tracy Brown contributed in Chicago. Aaron Morrison reported from New York City.