Kamala Harris' vice president candidacy forces a new definition of what an American should look like

When Kamala Harris first appeared with Joe Biden as his running mate last Wednesday, she said: "Joe Biden had the audacity to choose a Black woman to be his running mate. How incredible is that?"

She could just as well have said Biden had the audacity to choose an Indian American woman.

Nevertheless, Asian Americans and Indian Americans, in particular, appear to be willing to let that faux pas slide because they are aware of the social and political forces that are playing out in front of the television cameras.

The daughter of a father from Jamaica and a mother from India, she is not shy in talking her Indian heritage. "I am the daughter of Shyamala  Gopalan," a single mother who raised Harris and her sister Maya.

Growing up in the black community of Oakland and Berkeley, California, Harris mother had the foresight to know that her daughters would be perceived as African Americans and prepared the two girls for that. In the summers, she often took her daughters to the southern Indian city of Chennai to spend time with her extended family. 

"I grew up with a great deal of pride and understanding about my Indian heritage and culture,"Harris said.

Kamala and Maya Harris grew up well indoctrinated in the trials and tribulations of being of mixed race. Often, they were described as half-Indian and half-Black. 

"My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters," Harris writes in her recently published autobiography, The Truths We Hold. "She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women."

People who grew up with mixed racial  or cultural identities were often forced to choose one over the other. In wasn't until the 1990 Census that people could check off more than one race.

Its a category that is rising the fastest, according to the U.S. Census. It shouldn't surprise anybody that 44% of infants in Hawaii are multiracial or multiethnic. Shares are also high in Oklahoma and Alaska (28%).

About 14% of newborns in the U.S. have one parent who is non-Hispanic white and another who is Asian.

In California, where Kamala and Maya Harris were born, one in five babies have parents of different races. Not scientific but by observation, I'd venture to guess that Berkeley and Oakland are hotbeds of interracial families.

Born in the Philippines but raised in the U.S., like many immigrants, I wasn't biracial, but I considered myself bicultural, a product of two cultures. Brown as I am, I chafe at the purists who say I'm "not Filipino enough," because I don't speak a Filipino dialect. Equally, my blood boils when a racist who says, "Go back to your country."

Through the years, I've arrived at a conclusion that ahs helped calm the struggle over self-identity. I am not half Filipino and half Filipino. I am the sum total of both worlds; not less, but more. All the love, traditions, superstitions, pigmentation, family and tribal history of one, PLUS, the ideas, dreams and possibilities, biases and opinions of another. 

I can draw from two worlds instead of one, therefore I'm richer and more complex because of that.

Golf star Tiger Woods may have been ahead of his time when in 1997 he was widely ridiculed for saying that he didn’t consider himself as Black but “cablinasian,” referring to the Caucasian, Black, Indian and Asian, that represents the entirety of his racial identity.

Harris, likewise, can draw from the African American and the Indian American experiences. Instead of weaving in and out of those worlds as if they are separate, she embodies both identities all the time.

Harris has grown up with people questioning her identity. When young people ask her about living with her duality, she told the New York Times, “I will say to them that you will often find that you are the only one who looks like you in the room, be it around the conference table or in a meeting or wherever you are,” she told reporter Lisa Lerer. “But the thing to remember is you are never in that room alone. We are all in that room with you, expecting that you will use your voice, and use it with pride and use it in a way that represents all of those who are in the room with you but not physically there.”

Harris' duality confuses people who insist that you be one or the other; not considering that someone can be both at the same time. Indian Americans and Blacks are right to claim her as "one of our own," but its wrong to erase the other part of her in order feel more comfortable.

It is easier for most people to identify Beyonce as a Black woman even though she sings about being Creole.

When Kelsey Merritt was chosen as the first Filipina to model for Victoria Secrets, she was hit be critics because she wan't Filipina enough, she hit back. 

"I was born in the Philippines and I grew up in Pampanga. I finished my school in Manila before I moved to the US l... My blood is more Filipino than the 'pure' who have never set foot in the Philippines," Kelsey tweeted in Tagalog.

Because her mother is Filipino and father is white, Merritt had features that one can say are Caucasian but under a different light and different makeup, you can see her Filipino features come to the fore.

Any confusion about Senator Harris' identity is a problem Americans continue to struggle with. It is easy for journalists to label her one or the other, but that shouldn't be done by erasing the other part of Harris that completes her. 

Americans should get used to multiracial and/or multicultural people because that is what America is becoming. With immigrants coming from all over the world; the Asian American community is the fastest growing ethnic group and Whites will no longer be the majority race by 2040, predict demographers from the Census. 

As a Vice President candidate for the Democrats, Harris' complex heritage will force voters to grapple with who she is and that is a question that all Americans will have to face.

“There are people who will say, she isn’t Black enough. There are people who will say she’s not Indian enough,” the NY Times quotes Shekar Narasimhan, the chairman and founder of the AAPI Victory Fund, a group focused on empowering Asian American voters. “But she brings all that to the table, which is why I just think she’s a true American.”

The question about her dual heritage is not new to Harris. "So much so," she said, "that when I first ran for office that was one of the things that I struggled with, which is that you are forced through that process to define yourself in a way that you fit neatly into the compartment that other people have created," Harris said in a Washington Post interview.

"My point was: I am who I am. I'm good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I'm fine with it."