It has taken a Kamala Harris — half Jamaican, half Indian and by her own definition, all American — to show the United States and the world that race isn’t a black or white issue and there are grey areas in our understanding of identity.
That we are coming to this realisation only now, in 2020, is somewhat surprising. It has been two decades since the US Census Bureau allowed people to self-identify with more than one race when completing their census form. Back in 2015, a Pew Research Centre survey estimated that 6.9 per cent of America’s population was multi-racial. In 2008, the US got its first multi-racial president in Barack Obama, son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya. And yet, it is Ms Harris who is seen to embody an explicitly multi-racial reality.