Kamala Harris Family Tree | Race vs Ethnicit|Kamala Harris |Us president election2024

today I'm going to show you the family tree of kamla Harris a prominent us politician from a mixed race family I'll also be talking about the terms race and ethnicity and how they come into play when researching one's family tree [Music] kamla's father is Donald Harris he was born in Jamaica but immigrated to the US where he became a professor of Economics at Stanford University according to Professor Harris the two individuals who had the biggest influence on him during his upbringing in Jamaica were his two grandmothers known as miss krishy and miss Iris Miss krishy owned and operated a dry goods store in Brown the name Browntown comes from its founder Hamilton Brown an Irish slave owner who according to Donald was an ancestor of krishy brown this fact made the rounds last year when several far-right media Outlets tried to make comma Harris look like a hypocrite by claiming that her Jamaican ancestors were a bunch of slave owners here's the thing like I mentioned in my video on Barry Gordy most black Americans have at least one white male somewhere on their family tree because of the sad fact that during the period of American slavery slavers often raped females whom they enslaved but this doesn't change the fact that far more people on their tree were likely on the other side of that equation as enslaved individuals of African descent so how these facts are supposed to make kamla look bad is beyond me anyhow let's now look at the other side of her family her mother is shyamala gopalan she was born in chenai India but like Donal immigrated to the US the two actually met during their Graduate Studies at UC Berkeley and they were both involved in the US Cil Rights Movement but whereas Donald studied economics shyamala studied medicine and became a cancer researcher as I mentioned in my recent video on the maratas India is more of a continent than a country and therefore there's not really a single ethnicity known as Indian in shyam's case it would be more accurate to say that her ethnicity was Tamil this means that ethnically Kamala is half Tamil however according to kamla herself she primarily identifies simply as black which brings me to the topic of race and ethnicity let's look at the term ethnicity first generally speaking speaking ethnicity refers to a people group that lived in a particular region for a long period of time and thus ended up sharing a Common Language history and culture nowadays DNA testing companies claim to give people an ethnic breakdown of their ancestry but really what they're doing is just using a set of genetic samples from around the world to estimate the regions that a person's ancestors likely came from so in this sense ethnicity has also come to mean Regional genetic variation and thus has at least some sort of basis in science the important thing to keep in mind though is that the total number of ethnic groups existing in the world today numbers in the hundreds if not thousands and the exact way in which all the various ethnic groups are divided and named will vary depending on which research team is doing the work race however is something different according to most experts today race is simply a social construct and has no real basis in science although people have tried you cannot scientifically determine Race by grading skin tone by measuring skulls or by testing blood the closest thing you can get to race by using genetics is to Simply organize ethnic groups by continent so for example we can say that a person has primarily European ancestry African an ancestry Asian ancestry Etc but even there it gets complicated because genetic variation doesn't always match neatly with Continental lines for example North African DNA is quite distinct from subsaharan African DNA and South Asian DNA is quite distinct from East Asian DNA so when we try to match genetic variation with very specific color words like white black brown yellow red Etc the science of it all fades away very quickly and we're mostly just left with social conventions which sadly tend to be based more on Prejudice and stereotypes than on anything scientific so that's why it is usually said that race is a social construct most of the time a person's race is simply a combination of how that person chooses to Define themselves and perhaps even more so how Society chooses to Define them in America a person with one black parent and one white parent like Barack Obama for example is generally considered to be black this is because Society tends to treat that person as being a member of whichever race is less privileged in that Society because of this mixed race people usually end up self-identifying with the less privileged group in other words unfortunately race is often something that is defined by racism and society's tendency to racialize people this is why we end up with complicated issues such as passing and discussions on whether so and so is black enough so am I saying that we should be blind to race absolutely not ignoring race would be ignoring the fact that some people still get treated differently than other people people simply because of social constructs related to skin color this is particularly important when it comes to African-Americans long before the Advent of DNA tests people of European descent in the Americas have had the privilege of being able to Define their ethnicity in more precise terms for example I've long known that my ancestry is primarily a mix of English German and Irish however because of the long history of American slavery black Americans often don't have this privilege they simply know that their ancestors came from Africa therefore they are stuck with simply identifying as black so the bottom line is that race is still an important concept when it comes to understanding history and for making policy decisions today but don't think that it can be determined simply by looking looking at a person's family tree or their DNA results it's just not that simple anyway back to kamla Harris's tree her maternal grandfather was named PV gopalan he was a lifelong civil servant holding major government positions in both India and Zambia he along with his wife and children were Hindus and therefore Kamala grew up attending a Hindu temple as well as is a black Baptist church today kamla identifies primarily as Christian however she also has ties to Judaism that's because in 2014 she married Douglas mhof a Jewish lawyer he has a son and a daughter from a previous marriage and so although kamla has not had any children of her own she does have two stepchildren as for siblings kamla has one sister named Maya who is married to Tony West Maya like kamla became a lawyer and is currently also an MSNBC contributor Tony also a lawyer was associate attorney general under Barack Obama and currently is the chief legal officer for Uber Maya has a daughter named Mina who was born when Maya was in high school Tony is her stepdad she like the rest of the family is a lawyer but recently ly she also authored a book called kamla and Maya's big idea so that was a look at the family tree of KLA Harris potentially the first woman to hold the position of Vice President of the United States and potentially the first black American and American of Indian descent to hold this position as well thanks for watching [Music]