Analysis: Donald Trump questioning Kamala Harris' race shows he doesn't understand code-switching

Kamala Harris has range. She can grill nominees for the Supreme Court or meet with foreign dignitaries, then pivot to hosting a Diwali celebration or dancing enthusiastically alongside an HBCU-styled marching band.

It is a dexterity that Harris, the first Black woman and Asian American to serve as vice president, developed as a person of color to navigate the corridors of power or Main Street in a nation where race and identity influence how one is received or embraced.

Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, is an adroit code-switcher, a term that can include deliberately adjusting one’s speech style and expression to optimize relatability and ensure she gets a message across.

Former President Donald Trump, during a contentious interview session at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, showed no familiarity with the concept. He implied that Harris is inauthentic for embracing all aspects of her heritage. His failure to recognize code-switching also speaks to a prevailing belief that whiteness, often correlated with speaking in plainly enunciated English, is the default in our politics and democracy.

“We need to be celebrating our whole selves, which means we need to celebrate all of our identities,” said Christine Chen, co-founder and executive director of APIAVote, a nonpartisan civic engagement organization focused on the Asian American Pacific Islander community.

“The more that a candidate can embrace their multiple identities, I think that’s a way to connect with different communities and different people who identify on different issues that you stand on,” added Chen, who is Chinese American.

Trump, who falsely suggested to the annual gathering of Black journalists that the vice president has been misleading voters about her race, waded into murkier waters by insinuating Harris cannot be trusted because she “happened to turn Black” after she promoted her Indian heritage.

Harris doesn’t need to code-switch to prove she is a Black and Indian American woman; she was born that way.

Shereen Marisol Meraji, former co-host of the award-winning NPR podcast “Code Switch,” said Harris' identity is layered and can still be challenging to navigate in a nation that once encouraged multiracial people to favor one identity over another.

“If you walk through the world as I have, where I'm trying very much to embrace both sides of myself, then it's like you get put through these authenticity tests,” said Meraji, who is of Iranian and Puerto Rican heritage.

An assistant professor of race and journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Meraji added: “The ability to code-switch and go into different communities ... it is a huge asset. And I think for people who are in competition with Kamala Harris, it's also quite threatening.”

Many politicians of color code-switch to ensure vital information is delivered to voters and constituents with cultural resonance. This is a familiar concept among Americans of color, including the 33.8 million people identified as being more than one race, according to the last U.S. Census.

Code-switching is hardly new and it isn’t a skill entirely foreign to white people. But it remains one of the most effective communication tools that politicians of color use to wield influence and gain power in venues where they have historically not had it.

Code-switching can help increase the likelihood of receiving fair treatment, getting quality service or landing job opportunities for people who are disadvantaged or overlooked due to systemic racism.

After Trump questioned Harris’s race, in response to a question about his own diversity, equity and inclusion rhetoric, interviewer Rachel Scott of ABC News countered by citing elements of the vice president’s biography that might prove she is Black.

Scott noted that Harris attended Howard University, one of the nation’s most prominent historically Black colleges and universities. At Howard, Harris pledged the historically Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. And, most pointedly, her Jamaican father and Indian mother both immigrated to the U.S. during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

It is also false to claim that Harris has only embraced being Black or Indian, or code-switched between the two, when it benefited her politically.

In 2003, the year Harris was elected San Francisco district attorney, she told a local newspaper chain that many people were not used to her identity. “My Indian heritage is just as strong as my African American heritage. One does not exclude the other,” Harris said.

As a candidate for California attorney general, she spoke of her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan, teaching her and her sister to “share in the pride of our culture.” In 2009, Harris told the outlet India Abroad, “When we think about it, India is the oldest democracy in the world — so that is part of my background, and without question has had a great deal of influence on what I do today and who I am.”

During the 2012 reelection campaign of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, Harris related to being the underdog in races where her opponent could outspend her on commercial and ads. “I beat the odds to become the first Black attorney general,” she said, referring to her 2010 election in California.

Trump's challenging of Harris' identify, which drew groans and laughter, had echoes of him as the chief propagator of a false theory that Obama was ineligible to be president because was not born in the U.S.. Trump’s Republican running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, on Wednesday aligned with Trump when he suggested Harris is a “phony who caters to whatever audience is in front of her.”

“I don’t know if you saw this, but earlier this week … she went down to Georgia and started talking with a fake southern accent,” Vance told an audience at a rally in Glendale, Arizona, referencing Harris’s Atlanta campaign event that featured a predominantly Black audience.

Vance, a white man whose wife is Indian American and whose three children are of mixed heritage, is far from the first American politician to fixate on the speech and accents of politicians of color. In 2010, the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid came under under fire for comments he made years earlier suggesting Obama’s appealed to voters because he was a fair-skinned Black man “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

White politicians, too, have been known to code-switch when they are in front of largely Black or Latino audiences. And many have done so to varying degrees of success. In 2006, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was criticized for adapting her speech cadence while delivering remarks at Coretta Scott King’s funeral at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached.

The difference is that in the not so distant past, career survival for white politicians did not hinge on their ability to code-switch. Harris continues to have a different lived experience.

Chen said politicians of any races and identities can develop healthy relationships across all communities if they show compassion and are responsive to their constituents’ needs.

“Whether you are white or Black or any other identity, how you show up in the community will determine whether or not it’s an authentic relationship,” she said. “You’re going to be able to address their concerns more effectively because you’re actually more educated and understand what they’re going through.”

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Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed.

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Aaron Morrison is the AP’s Race and Ethnicity News Editor and reported from New York. He can be reached at amorrison@ap.org.