What does it mean to doubt the racial identity of a mixed-race woman who is among the most public and intensely vetted people in the world? The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser writes that we’ve seen exactly this tactic before — in the patently racist “birther” conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama that Trump and his votaries began during Obama’s first presidential run and still cling to today.
While it’s true that both Obama and Harris are of mixed racial heritage (although Obama’s non-black parent was white and Harris’s Indian), Trump’s charges against Harris are rooted in a specific cultural history: that of the feminizing of mixed-race identity in American culture.
Even in the pre–Civil War United States, when our greatest social distinction was between “free” and “not free” — before, to paraphrase W.E.B. Du Bois, the nation’s primary problem would become the problem of the color line — there were significant distinctions made among the enslaved based on their proximity to or distance from whiteness. Mixed-race women, for example, were more intensely feminized in the culture because of their perceived superior beauty, which made them more frequently the targets of white men’s lasciviousness. Studies such as the historian Jessica Marie Johnson’s Wicked Flesh — focusing on New Orleans, the capital of the antebellum sex-slave trade — have demonstrated the great peril to which these women’s hyperfeminization in the white imagination subjected them.
Although biracial women were, for obvious reasons, the first and most frequent victims of the feminization of mixed-race identity, they were not alone; biracial men faced it too, though it was weaponized against them to different ends. Some may recall the parodically feminized mixed-race character Adolph in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Laughable in his dandyism, Adolph is portrayed as contemptibly sycophantic toward white people and as lacking solidarity with his enslaved brethren. As I have shown at length elsewhere, in the Jim Crow era — whose racial binarism made race the foundational aspect of identity that it is today — biraciality would be further feminized as a metaphor for impotency and disorientation. In a world hardwired to think in black or white, to be neither is tantamount to being no one. As the ending of the famous mixed-race poet Langston Hughes’s “Cross” has it:
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?