In July 2024, when Kamala Harris won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in short order, her opponent Donald Trump went so far as to question her identity as a Black woman in one of his first speeches. He alleged that she decided over time to identify as Black to benefit her career. This racist dog whistle came as no surprise, of course, but it shows above all the tremendous ignorance of history prevalent among Trump and his supporters. Historically, African Americans in the USA have never had much say themselves in establishing their own skin color. 

In 1662, one of the earliest laws on slavery in Virginia addressed the children of enslaved women and white men. Out of fear of their own holdings, these children were declared automatically by law to be slaves with no civil rights. There was no escaping their status as enslaved individuals nor being read as Black. This continued to have an effect even after the end of slavery, when a pseudo-scientific definition persisted that claimed that even one drop of supposedly “Black blood” was sufficient to define Blackness. 

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, African Americans began to express their own culture and intellectuality with pride. And yet even today, Black identity is still largely defined by external forces and without consent. Barack Obama, whose father came from Kenya, and whose white mother came from Kansas, served as the first Black president of the USA.