In what counts as one of the bizarre attacks of this year’s presidential race, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, stands accused of wrongly characterizing herself as a “daughter of Oakland.” According to an investigative report in The New York Times, Harris was born in the adjacent Berkeley, California.
Jesse Watters at Fox News went so far as to hold up Harris’ birth certificate with that Berkeley home address listed. As awful as that was, Watters using Harris’ birth certificate as some kind of gotcha was not only a reminder of the “birther” attacks on President Barack Obama, but it also revealed what this inquisition is really about: portraying Harris as sneaky, inauthentic and unworthy of trust.
Watters using Harris’ birth certificate revealed what this inquisition is really about: portraying Harris as sneaky, inauthentic and unworthy of trust.
Americans give a lot of attention to where a candidate is from and presidential candidates spend a lot of time emphasizing where they’re from — or at least emphasizing the place they’ve chosen to say they’re from. For example, as a candidate, and even as a president, Joe Biden has rarely missed an opportunity to mention his scrappy Scranton, Pennsylvania, roots. Yes, that’s where he was born, but Biden’s family relocated to Delaware when he was in elementary school. It’s likely that relatively few people know which cities in that state he called home as a child and teenager, but we know Biden eventually ended up in Wilmington where many residents affectionately refer to him as “Delaware Joe.”
All politicians, Harris included, are aware that the question of where they’re from is more about identity, or at least the identity we want to project, than geography. Home isn’t just a matter of where we say we’re from, it’s also about where others decide it makes the most sense for us to be from. If I tell you I’m from Detroit, then that conjures up not just associations, but expectations and explanations that are different than what they’d be if I told you I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. Geographers, city planners and urban designers call this place-based identity. Politicians call this useful.
As someone who was born in the Bay Area and then lived in Evanston, Illinois; Madison, Wisconsin; and Montreal, Canada, before returning to the East Bay, there are a lot of places for Harris to gesture toward as potential homes and homes-away-from home. She chose Oakland.
Harris supporters like that she’s the celebrated daughter of a city we want to root for, too. They like the association for the same reason that her critics want to question it: it is politically useful, just like Biden’s beginning in gritty Scranton, or her running mate Tim Walz’s in small-town Nebraska. After all, the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland in 1966 and organized a host of social services for low-income families such as legal aid, health clinics and free breakfast programs for kids. At least since then, Oakland has become synonymous with Black resistance, racial pride and self-reliance. It kind of reminds us of the underdog Harris says she is.
Barack Obama always put his Kansas roots (where his mother grew up) alongside his Hawaiian birthplace even as he claimed the South Side of Chicago as a home. Jeb Bush and George W. Bush shedding their ties to coastal Maine helped them get elected the governors of Florida and Texas respectively, and the Texan was twice elected president. Donald Trump is from Queens but has always wanted to be seen as the “king of Manhattan.”
Rightfully or not, a candidate’s hometown ends up symbolizing something profound about the individual, what the person stands for and, as importantly, whom the candidate will fight for. It’s why some of Harris’ Republican critics insist she was “raised in Canada.”
Harris may be fudging things slightly when she calls herself “the daughter of Oakland,” but she shouldn’t be singled out for it. Many people who grew up next to a big city call that bigger city home. Instead of asking whether it’s technically true that she’s from Oakland and whether she ought to be corrected for slighting Berkeley, we ought to be asking whether we put more demands on Black candidates to authenticate who they say they are, and whether their answers are more closely scrutinized.
Instead of asking whether it’s technically true that she’s from Oakland, we ought to be asking whether we put more demands on Black candidates to authenticate who they say they are.
By all indications, Oakland loves Harris and claims her back and doesn’t care where she went to primary school. Republicans who profess to be upset about it are, in keeping with Trump’s insulting attack on her identity, suggesting that she is falsely trying to claim Blackness. When she’s only doing what all politicians do: naming a place of origin that signals her politics. Yes, Harris gains bona fides from being associated with a city that symbolizes Black working class grit and activism, and not the image of white elitism and radicalism associated with San Francisco but especially Berkeley.
But JD Vance made a name for himself by highlighting his Appalachian roots and using that to illustrate how far he’s come even though Appalachia isn’t where he’s actually from. Candidates such as Harris and Obama are subjected to more questions about their origins not because politicians as a rule give wholly truthful and clear declarations about their origins, but because they’re seen as not belonging in the first place. Writer Zadie Smith summed it up nicely in 2008 when she said that many of the public’s reservations about Obama stemmed from their inability to pinpoint where exactly he was from and who exactly he represented. To these people, he appeared too chameleonlike, too skilled at speaking to the many faces of American society. Smith said it was less a matter of Obama changing himself depending on his location, and more that he was from more than one place all at the same time, none truer or fuller than another. “Where are you from?” is a loaded question that on its surface seems simple. The answer isn’t clear-cut for me, and it isn’t clear-cut for many of us. Are we talking about where I was born or where I grew up? What do we say if our family moved around a lot or if we spent some formative years abroad? We might answer differently depending on who’s asking, why we think they’re asking or what we feel comfortable sharing. As for Harris, it’s not that important where home is according to her birth certificate. She had no say in that matter. Where she chooses to say she’s from tells us a lot more.
Robyn Autry
Robyn Autry is a sociology professor and director of the Center for the Study of Public Life at Wesleyan University. She is the author of “Desegregating the Past: The Public Life of Memory in the U.S. and South Africa.” 
