‘Tell me I belong here’: Trump, Kamala and speaking from ‘a placeless place’

The problem with Donald Trump’s questioning of Kamala Harris’s racial identity is that a white man should dare to continue a despicable tradition: of trying define the identity of others, particularly people who don’t look like them.

It was ever thus.

Think of these words – quadroon, octoroon, quintroon. They signified the fractions of someone’s blackness, as totted up by white colonial society.

Someone with one-quarter African heritage and three-quarters European was a quadroon.

One-eighth African heritage was octoroon.

One-sixteenth was quintroon.

There was also mulatto, a biracial person with one fully black parent and one fully white parent, or with two mulatto parents.

In census surveys and cultural surveys, black people and people of colour were classified and kept in their place.

In British-ruled India, Eurasians (or mixed-race people) were often classified by visual and biological degrees of whiteness and Anglo-Indians with fairer complexions aspired to ‘escape’ their grim category and ‘pass’ as Europeans. Actress Vivien Leigh was  a famous example.

It feels like a step back in time even to list terms like octoroon because they reference an ugly, divisive and discriminatory mindset. We now consider such a frame of thinking outdated and offensive. By chance, I recently came across quadroon in a novel. But The Awakening, which is set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, was written in 1899 and reflected the language and attitudes of that time.

So, it seems does Mr Trump, despite using 21st century tools and platforms to broadcast his views. Indeed, Mr Trump appears to have revived some version of that old-world thinking by insisting at the National Association of Black Journalists meeting that Ms Harris – a visually Black woman with a Jamaican father and Indian mother – define herself more precisely. Why should she, one might ask. Does Mr Trump, who’s of German and Scottish and Irish ancestry, define himself precisely? He feels no need to do so. No black or brown person demands it.

See the tone of this discussion? It could very quickly veer down racial categories such as quadroon or octoroon.

We’d meditate on the fact that Russia’s great poet Alexander Pushkin was, in technical terms, an octoroon, with one African great-grandparent and seven European great-grandparents.

And soon, we’d be asking if Barack Obama might have been called a quadroon in the 19th century? [He wouldn’t. A quadroon was supposed to be a person with one biracial African-Caucasian parent and one white or European parent. By that token, Mr Obama is biracial but not a quadroon as his father was African rather than biracial and his mother white. However, had Mr Obama married a white woman rather than Michelle, their daughters Sasha and Malia would be cast as quadroons in the old-world nomenclature.]

It’s easy to get lost in such pointless detail about something over which we have no control – ancestry and race – but we’re not going back – to that way of thinking, no thanks to Donald Trump.

In his haunting 2021 poem ‘Mulatto’:: ‘Quadroon’, Charif Shanahan writes:

““Mulatto” :: “Quadroon”/ I want to tell you what for me it has been like./ To speak at all / I must occupy a position / in a system whose positions / I appear not to occupy”.

The poem, which is in Mr Shanahan’s second poetry collection, continues the theme of the first, which emerges in a request and a poem titled ‘Tell me I belong here’.

We can understand why he asks because his mother is from Morocco and he has said that “racial discourse in this country [his native America] is often flattened into one of a few mainstream narratives…” Mr Shanahan, an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, adds that his poem ‘Mulatto’:: ‘Quadroon’ seeks to broaden the discussion on racial identity because “one cause of the limits on expression is the tendency to conceive of race, myopically, in terms of a static presence or absence of privilege, when privilege is dynamic. I have privilege in one room, then I absolutely do not in the next. And the reason I lack privilege in the second room is the reason I have it in the first. How do you ‘position’ (name) that?”

Isn’t that what Mr Trump was trying to do with Ms Harris?

Here’s Charif Shanahan’s poem ‘Mulatto’:: ‘Quadroon’, in full:

You can see already how this will work out for you.

You will dither into and out of your days.

You will find the conditions with which to talk a good game

—Oh, that California sun, the air is just cleaner out here—

As the vines grow tighter around the house—this time,

A borrowed one, shared with twenty-two white eccentrics,

Three of whom are the children you used to say

You wanted, but no longer see

As viable. Who gets to live the life

They think they want? So few of us

Curate with energy… You’ll come to an end

Which will feel final but naturally also be

A beginning, and you can see how that phase will work out for you, too.

It’s all a single thread, after all, a single braid,

Only looking closely do you see the frays, do the vines

Grow tighter. You’ll seek help from two women

Dedicated to helping others and they will be unable

To help you, despite your organizing your life around their help.

That’s the way it is, you know: you look to the left and to your right

A golden ticket falls from the sky; you write a book of poems

And your hero, at your book party, tosses her hand through the air

To tell her friend who’s just asked who you are that you are nobody.

“Mulatto” :: “Quadroon”

I want to tell you what for me it has been like.

To speak at all

I must occupy a position

Though the system provides positions

I do not clearly occupy.

Though some say such non-position is

My position—

Speak from that placeless place outside the system etc

Some would say and have said—

If the placeless place is created by terms

Of the system then it must be

Within the system even if it appears

Otherwise. And so

It may be that the position which is

Presumed to be of body

Might better be regarded as

A position of thought or

A receptivity to possible experience

As conceived by the still

Implausible eye

Of a man who defined

The flimsy self he carried

Against those whom he did not

Understand or know or in any real sens

See—

And if the possible vision

Of that implausible eye

Accounted for you

In name only

Then filed you under

Consequence—Side effect

It is not that the system fails

To position you

It positions you actively

And specifically nowhere

So that you appear on the outside

But remain within

Or you appear within

But remain on the outside

Which is to say in other words

A part and apart—

And so

If to speak in a particular social world I must

Occupy a position and that social world consists

Of positions that are clear but none

Of which clearly I occupy

Then it may be that I cannot even if I want to

Tell you what for me it has been like

And so