Kamala Harris should embrace her biracial heritage as a campaign strategy 

The legendary Janet Jackson has added herself to a growing list of people focused on Vice President Kamala Harris’s race, falsely echoing earlier claims by Former President Donald Trump that Harris is somehow not Black.

The one person who has been conspicuously absent from the ongoing discourse about Harris’s racial identity is Harris herself.  

Harris has generally avoided conversations about her race. In response to Trump’s comments that she only recently “turned Black,” she simply said, “Same old, tired playbook.” She did not mention her race once in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. 

On Monday, that changed.  

Harris appeared on “All the Smoke,” a podcast hosted by former NBA players, and finally spoke openly about her race, saying, “I’m clear about who I am. … My mother was very clear. She was raising two Black girls to be two proud Black women. It was never a question.”  

Of course Harris is Black — her father was Jamaican — but she is also Indian American. As a psychology professor who studies how people think about social groups, my research suggests that Harris would be judged most positively if she defined herself by her full identity as Black and Indian American. 

Although race is a social construct, human psychology leads people to believe race is both inherent and essential. Somewhat surprisingly, these views extend to how we think about biracial identity. People — even those who are biracial themselves — conceptualize biracial identity as a “mixture” of identities that cannot be separated. Therefore, biracial people who claim just one race, or who identify flexibly based on context, are judged as duplicitous.  

So it is not surprising that social media is aflame when Harris engages in the common practice of “code switching” — that is, changing the ways that she speaks across context, such as using a “Black accent” in Detroit and a Standard American English accent in Pittsburgh when discussing the importance of unions.

Ongoing research from my lab at University of California, Santa Barbara, shows this scientifically. My colleagues, Dr. Brenda Major and doctoral student Elizabeth Quinn-Jensen, and I surveyed 371 white American adults, asking them questions about a biracial person who initially claimed to be biracial and later claimed to be (only) Black.

Participants said that someone who made this shift was misrepresenting their identity and was untrustworthy. Importantly, participants positively evaluated biracial people who consistently claimed their full identity. A second survey found the same pattern in a diverse sample of 215 non-white American adults, about half of whom were Black.  

But why did people judge identity shifting? 

When Trump called Harris a racial chameleon and Republican vice presidential candidate, JD Vance hopped on the bandwagon, telling CNN that Harris was a “fundamentally fake person,” their supporters on X chimed in, eagerly noting they don’t care that Harris is Black, they just don’t like that she changes her identity to gain an (unfair) advantage. 

In our survey, we asked this question head-on: How much do “unfair” advantages matter? To test this, we randomly assigned people to read about the same identity shift (from biracial to only Black), taking place on either a scholarship application or on an anonymous survey. Participants believed there would be no benefit to switching identities on an anonymous survey.

Despite this, a biracial person who claimed a Black identity on an anonymous survey was rated as untrustworthy as a biracial person who shifted their identity to gain a scholarship. Again, this pattern held for both white and non-white Americans. 

The impact of identity switching, or not claiming her full identity, may be particularly problematic for Harris. Since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris has faced accusations of flip-flopping from all sides (think: immigration and fracking). She has moved to the center since her failed 2020 presidential run and is struggling to defend her record as vice president while differentiating herself from Joe Biden. Her racial identity may be interpreted as another means of flip-flopping. 

Cultivating a reputation as trustworthy is particularly important as Election Day ticks nearer, with the outcome a true toss-up. Undecided voters will have a big impact on the final outcome. But undecided voters are less engaged with politics and rely more on likeability than issues. Trustworthiness is a key component of likeability, so Harris cannot afford to look untrustworthy. 

Of course, Harris is not the only one in the race. Trump easily loses the battle for appearing trustworthy, consistently makes false claims ranging from big issues (that the 2020 election was “stolen”) to seemingly meaningless ones (crowd sizes at Harris’s rallies). At this point, Trump is a household name and people know what he is about. He doesn’t care to court voters with niceties, and his main strategy for dealing with personal critiques is to lob even harsher critiques at others.  

But, when it comes to trust and the likeability game, if Harris is playing to win, she can take notes from “All the Smoke” co-host Matt Barnes, who notes he is proud of both his Italian and Black heritage. Kamala Harris’s candidacy is historic: she should openly define herself as the first Indian American and Black woman to seek our nation’s highest office as a major-party nominee. 

Zoe Liberman is a professor of psychological and brain sciences at University of California, Santa Barbara, and a public voices fellow of The OpEd Project.