Kamala Harris Family Tree - Race vs Ethnicity - video Dailymotion

Minahil Khan

Kamala Harris Family Tree - Race vs Ethnicity

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00:00Today, I'm going to show you the family tree of Kamala Harris, a prominent US politician

00:07from a mixed-race family. I'll also be talking about the terms race and ethnicity and how

00:14they come into play when researching one's family tree.

00:33Kamala's father is Donald Harris. He was born in Jamaica but immigrated to the US where

00:39he became a professor of economics at Stanford University. According to Professor Harris,

00:45the two individuals who had the biggest influence on him during his upbringing in Jamaica were

00:51his two grandmothers, known as Miss Crishy and Miss Iris. Miss Crishy owned and operated

00:58a dry goods store in Brownstown. The name Brownstown comes from its founder, Hamilton

01:03Brown, an Irish slave owner who, according to Donald, was an ancestor of Crishy Brown.

01:10This fact made the rounds last year when several far-right media outlets tried to make Kamala

01:16Harris look like a hypocrite by claiming that her Jamaican ancestors were a bunch of slave

01:22owners. Here's the thing. Like I mentioned in my video on Barry Gordy, most black Americans

01:28have at least one white male somewhere on their family tree because of the sad fact

01:35that, during the period of American slavery, slavers often raped females whom they enslaved.

01:43But this doesn't change the fact that far more people on their tree were likely on the

01:49other side of that equation, as enslaved individuals of African descent. So, how these facts are

01:55supposed to make Kamala look bad is beyond me.

01:58Anyhow, let's now look at the other side of her family. Her mother is Shyamala Gopalan.

02:04She was born in Chennai, India but, like Donald, immigrated to the US. The two actually met

02:10during their graduate studies at UC Berkeley and they were both involved in the US civil

02:16rights movement. But whereas Donald studied economics, Shyamala studied medicine and became

02:22a cancer researcher. As I mentioned in my recent video on the Marathas, India is more

02:28of a continent than a country and therefore there's not really a single ethnicity known

02:34as Indian. In Shyamala's case, it would be more accurate to say that her ethnicity was

02:40Tamil. This means that, ethnically, Kamala is half Tamil. However, according to Kamala

02:47herself, she primarily identifies simply as black.

02:52Which brings me to the topic of race and ethnicity. Let's look at the term ethnicity first. Generally

02:59speaking, ethnicity refers to a people group that lived in a particular region for a long

03:05period of time and thus ended up sharing a common language, history, and culture. Nowadays,

03:10DNA testing companies claim to give people an ethnic breakdown of their ancestry. But

03:16really, what they're doing is just using a set of genetic samples from around the world

03:20to estimate the regions that a person's ancestors likely came from. So in this sense, ethnicity

03:27has also come to mean regional genetic variation and thus has at least some sort of basis in

03:34science.

03:35The important thing to keep in mind though is that the total number of ethnic groups

03:40existing in the world today numbers in the hundreds if not thousands and the exact way

03:46in which all the various ethnic groups are divided and named will vary depending on which

03:52research team is doing the work. Race, however, is something different. According to most

03:58experts today, race is simply a social construct and has no real basis in science. Although

04:05people have tried, you cannot scientifically determine race by grading skin tone, by measuring

04:13skulls, or by testing blood. The closest thing you can get to race by using genetics is to

04:20simply organize ethnic groups by continent. So, for example, we can say that a person

04:26has primarily European ancestry, African ancestry, Asian ancestry, etc. But even there, it gets

04:34complicated because genetic variation doesn't always match neatly with continental lines.

04:41For example, North African DNA is quite distinct from Sub-Saharan African DNA and South Asian

04:47DNA is quite distinct from East Asian DNA. So, when we try to match genetic variation

04:54with very specific colour words like white, black, brown, yellow, red, etc., the science

05:00of it all fades away very quickly and we're mostly just left with social conventions,

05:07which sadly tend to be based more on prejudice and stereotypes than on anything scientific.

05:13So that's why it is usually said that race is a social construct. Most of the time, a

05:22person's race is simply a combination of how that person chooses to define themselves

05:28and perhaps even more so, how society chooses to define them. In America, a person with

05:35one black parent and one white parent, like Barack Obama for example, is generally considered

05:41to be black. This is because society tends to treat that person as being a member of

05:46whichever race is less privileged in that society. Because of this, mixed-race people

05:53end up self-identifying with the less privileged group. In other words, unfortunately, race

06:00is often something that is defined by racism and society's tendency to racialize people.

06:09This is why we end up with complicated issues such as passing and discussions on whether

06:14so-and-so is black enough.

06:17So am I saying that we should be blind to race? Absolutely not. Ignoring race would

06:24be ignoring the fact that some people still get treated differently than other people

06:30simply because of social constructs related to skin color. This is particularly important

06:36when it comes to African Americans. Long before the advent of DNA tests, people of European

06:43descent in the Americas have had the privilege of being able to define their ethnicity in

06:49more precise terms. For example, I've long known that my ancestry is primarily a mix

06:56of English, German, and Irish. However, because of the long history of American slavery, black

07:04Americans often don't have this privilege. They simply know that their ancestors came

07:09from Africa. Therefore, they are stuck with simply identifying as black.

07:16So the bottom line is that race is still an important concept when it comes to understanding

07:22history and for making policy decisions today. But don't think that it can be determined

07:28simply by looking at a person's family tree or their DNA results. It's just not that

07:35simple.

07:36Anyway, back to Kamala Harris's tree. Her maternal grandfather was named P. V. Gopalan.

07:45He was a lifelong civil servant, holding major government positions in both India and Zambia.

07:51He, along with his wife and children, were Hindus and therefore Kamala grew up attending

07:57a Hindu temple as well as a black Baptist church. Today, Kamala identifies primarily

08:04as Christian. However, she also has ties to Judaism. That's because in 2014, she

08:12married Douglas Emhoff, a Jewish lawyer. He has a son and a daughter from a previous marriage

08:18and so although Kamala has not had any children of her own, she does have two stepchildren.

08:26As for siblings, Kamala has one sister, named Maya, who is married to Tony West. Maya, like

08:33Kamala, became a lawyer and is currently also an MSNBC contributor. Tony, also a lawyer,

08:40was Associate Attorney General under Barack Obama and currently is the Chief Legal Officer

08:47for Uber. Maya has a daughter, named Meena, who was born when Maya was in high school.

08:54Tony is her stepdad. She, like the rest of the family, is a lawyer. But recently, she

08:59also authored a book called Kamala and Maya's Big Idea.

09:04So that was a look at the family tree of Kamala Harris. Potentially the first woman to hold

09:10the position of Vice President of the United States and potentially the first black American

09:17and American of Indian descent to hold this position as well.

Kamala Harris Family Tree - Race vs Ethnicity

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