Kamala Harris’s The Truths We Hold: An American Journey

Kamala Harris’s The Truths We Hold: An American Journey (2019) was published just two weeks before the 21 January 2019 declaration of her presidential run. Her campaign revealed that it was timed to coincide with Martin Luther King Day and was meant to fall in the same week that Shirley Chisholm had made a bid 47 years earlier to become the Democratic Party’s first African American female presidential nominee. The function of such a document is to introduce the candidate to voters as both a public figure and a private self. As the timing of the campaign launch suggests, Harris’s memoir primarily crafts her identity as an African American woman, whose background as a “progressive prosecutor” and experience as a US senator qualify her to lead the country. Yet her identity as the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father complicates her narrow self-presentation as an African American. That self-presentation is at odds with Harris’s background in law enforcement, given the role of the police and courts in violating the human rights and civil liberties of people of color, particularly African Americans, who, historically, have borne the brunt of police racism and rage. These contradictions animate the autobiography. Briahna Gray has eloquently written on the tensions coiled in Harris’s experience of being African American and an attorney general, pointing out that her record on criminalizing truancy, for example, has hurt low-income families of color, while Lara Bazelon has convincingly challenged the claims that Harris’s prosecutorial record are progressive. Instead, my interest lies in how the construction of African American identity in The Truths We Hold requires the omission of Indian and Jamaican experiences, which, more tellingly, is emblematic of a xenophobic and inwardly focused national culture, one that has resulted in a brutal, pitiless foreign policy.

Throughout The Truths We Hold, Harris projects her identity as an African American without engaging with the immigrant origins of her parents. The elision of her Jamaican ancestry, in particular, indicates a fairly restricted understanding of African American identity, which she attaches to the territorial US instead of the African diaspora more broadly. As the debates about former President Barack Obama’s identity demonstrated, African American politicians shoulder the burden of having to prove their claims to an authentic black identity, whatever that might mean. What happens, however, if we emphasize the American in African American and read Harris’s identity through the lens of internationalism and foreign policy? On that register, Harris’s elision of her immigrant antecedents very much coincides with the inability of most Americans of all races, and of US political discourse generally, to think of the nation as part of the world.

Among the many gifts of being raised by immigrant parents is perhaps the potential to acquire a kind of “double consciousness” of foreign policy, which contrasts with the more pejorative associations of the term that W. E. B. Du Bois famously coined in 1903. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he describes double consciousness as the fracturing of subjectivity experienced by African Americans, who carry the burden of acting in a world that makes them simultaneously consider how those actions are viewed by the larger racialized social order. As a matter of self-preservation, African Americans are forced to be both subjects and objects of their actions. They must contend constantly with the racist vision of themselves as threats in even the most innocuous of circumstances. Everyday encounters require them to anticipate how they will be perceived by others, and to modify their behavior accordingly.

The children of immigrants also experience a kind of double consciousness that hinges on an awareness of how their less-assimilated parents are perceived in mundane interactions with the public. Harris describes a scenario familiar to children of such parents when she writes: “I have too many memories of my brilliant mother being treated as though she were dumb because of her accent.” She also records how indignant she felt when her mother was...