Fact Check: Kamala Harris’ birth certificate used to discredit her Indian, Jamaican heritage

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The word “Caucasian” in Kamala Harris’ birth certificate does not mean Harris is white, contrary to online posts that negate her Indian and Jamaican descent.
By Reuters Fact Check

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ birth certificate has been shared in posts online as proof that the Democratic presidential candidate is not of Asian American or Black Jamaican heritage.
Harris’ birth certificate in images online does not include her race. It lists her mother’s birthplace as India and her mother’s race as Caucasian, while her father’s birthplace is listed as Jamaica and his race as Jamaican.

One post on Facebook said the birth certificate proves “She Is Not Black.” Another post pointed to her mother being listed as Caucasian and said, “She’s a white woman!!!”
Harris, however, has both Black Jamaican and Indian ancestry. The social media posts misinterpret historical racial classifications, conflating “Caucasian” with “white,” which is inaccurate.

Since announcing her presidential campaign, Harris has been targeted by sexist and racist misinformation. Republican candidate Donald Trump has said she only recently began identifying as Black, which is false.

‘CAUCASIAN’ MOTHER

Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, self-identified as Caucasian in her daughter’s 1964 birth certificate.

“Indians were classified as white/Caucasian in the US in the 1960s,” Prema Kurien, Daicoff Faculty Scholar at Syracuse University, said in an email.
“This is probably why Harris’s mother picked Caucasian as the term to use. That may have meant something different to her than ‘White,’” Kurien said.

Anthropologists had thought people from the Caucasus ,Mountain region included Europeans and Indians, Nitasha Sharma, director of the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University, said in an email.
“This ‘anthropological science’ (debunked) led to the classification of Indians in the US as ‘Caucasian,’” Sharma said.

CAUCASIAN, NOT WHITE

In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that Caucasian is not the same as white.
“At that time, and until relatively recently, people haven’t used the term ‘White’ but used the term ‘Caucasian,’” Sharma said. She said that back then, Indians might have been grouped into the latter category.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1923 concluded, that although anthropologists classified Indians as Caucasian, they were not white as commonly understood in the U.S., thus making them ineligible for citizenship under a 1790 law, naturalizing any “free white person.”

The U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind decision, said the words “Caucasian” and “white person” were treated as synonymous in the U.S. based on popular meaning, but that the two terms are not identical (pages 208-209).

INDIANS IN U.S. CENSUS

The racial classification for Indians changed over the 20th century.
When updating its policy in 1995, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) noted that Asian Indians had counted as “Hindus” in censuses from 1920 to 1940 but as “White” in 1950 to 1970 (page 44,675).

In 1978, an OMB statistical policy handbook, included Indians in the “Asian or Pacific Islander” racial category (page 37).

It was not until 1980, that “Asian Indian” was included as a category, opens new tab in the U.S. census after mobilization from Indian American advocacy groups, Kurien said.

Bakirathi Mani, the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, said via phone called this categorization over the years was “not consistent.”

As the categories for Asians expanded, the 2020 U.S. Census questionnaire (page 4) included an option for “Asian Indian” as well as write-in options and examples for “Other Asian.” Census data is based, opens new tab on self-identification.

DONALD HARRIS SELF-IDENTIFIED AS ‘JAMAICAN’

Harris’ father Donald Harris grew up, in Jamaica, immigrated to the U.S. in 1961 and self-identified his race as “Jamaican” in Harris’ birth certificate.
The U.S. Census currently includes, people of Jamaican heritage among groups considered ,to be Black or African American.

Jamaica’s population largely consists of descendants of enslaved Africans brought by the English to work the island’s sugar estates with a small proportion (15.1%) having mixed Afro-European ancestry, according to the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.

VERDICT

False.

The word “Caucasian” in Kamala Harris’ birth certificate does not mean Harris is white, contrary to online posts that negate her Indian and Jamaican descent.

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