So we can all agree Obama is white, right?

Maybe you shouldn't take your conception of race mixing from segregationists.

Not long ago, Donald Trump exercised his usual penchant for making headlines by offending people, with comments about Kamala Harris "happening to turn black" and asking "Is she Indian or is she black?" In the latter question, Trump was doing what racial questionnaires have asked us racially mixed people to do for our whole lives: "Are you [ ] Black [ ] Asian [ ] White? Pick one." (Wizards of the Coast, meanwhile, is now proud to newly erase mixed people from a game that actually represented us back in the '80s.)

Nothing in Trump's remarks is welcoming to racially mixed people, of course. Most news outlets and commenters predictably responded to them with righteous indignation. And that indignation might feel affirming to me… if I thought that those outlets really were trying to acknowledge racially mixed people as racially mixed. But they don't actually do that.

News outlets regularly describe Harris simply as black, simply as Asian, or simply as both, depending on context. In the context of Trump's remarks, nearly every story reporting on or replying to Trump's comments will present some variant of this claim, embedded in a subordinate clause as an obvious matter of fact: "Harris, who is both Black and Asian American…"

To which I cheerfully respond: "Yes! Like Barack Obama, who is both black and white! Right?

… right?"

Barack Obama: every bit as white as Kamala Harris as Asian. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

When I make that remark, it always triggers an uncomfortable and embarrassed silence. Harris is assumed to be fully both sides of her ancestry, and we chide as racist the people who refuse to allow her to be both; we think that it is so obvious that it can be buried as a matter-of-fact statement in the middle of a sentence without further comment. Yet Obama and I are not. My ancestry is every bit as white as Kamala Harris's is black; Obama's ancestry is every bit as white as Harris's is South Asian. All three of us are half and half: we all have one parent who was entirely one race and one parent who was entirely the other. But only Harris gets to be both. Obama and I don't. And we're supposed to just accept all of this as obvious given fact.

No matter how much fury people show at the idea that Trump might dare to say Harris is not black or not Asian, I have never once seen anyone claim that either Obama or I have a legitimate claim to be white. I have never once seen anyone refer to Obama simply as white in any context, the way they refer to Harris simply as black or simply as Asian in relevant contexts. Likewise, nobody has ever called me white. (Well, okay, I can think of one exception to that, but of the rule-proving variety: a decade or two ago, when I sang "U Can't Touch This" at a karaoke night and wiggled my legs unrhythmically in a goofy parody of M.C. Hammer's dance, one guest watched this spectacle and asked: "How can someone so brown be so white?")

In the Laws of Manu or Manusmṛti, the traditional Indian text articulating a caste-based legal system, caste mixing is always viewed as an evil. Therefore, the offspring of an inter-caste relationship is always viewed as the lower of the two castes, at best. (That system, I might note, would likely judge me as white, since a foreigner, a yavana, is much lower than a brahmin. Such a classification, ironically, fits well with my own experiences in India.)

In the Reconstruction period (after the American Civil War), Southern whites and their goverrnments reacted with horror at the idea that they were now expected to treat black people as full human beings rather than as slaves. They reserved particular horror for the thought of miscegenation: where black and white people would marry and have mixed children. The fear of miscegenation was a core argument for racial segregation: if you let the races mix, they'll start marrying each other and having mixed children. And just like in the Laws of Manu, it was taken for granted that that was a bad thing. It was not until 1997 that a majority of white Americans approved of marriages between white and non-white people.

That horror of miscegenation also led to a new racial rule being codified in American law: a rule very much like Manu's, known as the one-drop rule. It didn't matter if 127 of your great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were white: the 128th one who wasn't would irredeemably pollute their white blood with one drop of degenerate contamination, and therefore you did not get to count as white. The concern, and therefore the rule, was about preserving the purity of whiteness: in the words of racism advocate Madison Grant, "The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew."

Now, in 1954 the US Supreme Court struck down the legal segregation régime in Brown v. Board of Education, and the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s put that into practice. In 1967 the Loving v. Virginia case struck down miscegenation laws. There is now no formal legal régime of segregation or miscegenation left anywhere in the United States. The entire rationale for the one-drop rule no longer means anything, and the rule no longer exists in American law.

Yet somehow American racial discourse continues to insist on the one-drop rule in practice – even among people who style themselves "progressive" or "antiracist". In no such circle have I ever, even once, seen anyone ever suggest that maybe people who have some white ancestry should be allowed to call themselves white. In practice they agree with Madison Grant: any contamination of your racial purity with the blood of the inferior races is sufficient to make you fall from whiteness. If the one-drop rule was good enough for the segregationists, it's good enough for them.

Sadly, that approach seems all too consistent with the more general approach taken by "antiracists". For in other domains, it turns out, they actually advocate for the races to segregate more than they previously had. Contemporary "antiracists" somehow seem to think that it's wrong for one race to borrow from the culture of another race. They also require public-school students to separate themselves by race for racial conversations. So I'll admit that in my more cynical moments I sometimes muse: of course they adopt a definition of race that is hostile to racial mixing; they would rather the races didn't mix anyway. To be clear, I don't think this is how such people actually think about the issue. It's their impact, not their intent, that is segregationist. I am sure they would all vehemently deny being anti-miscegenation if asked, and they would sincerely believe that denial. I just wish they would act on it.

If you're still not willing to accept that Obama and I are white, then you have to accept that Harris's identity is just as complex as Obama's and mine is. It is not obvious that Harris is "both black and Asian". I think it makes more sense to accept that Obama and I are half-white, and Harris is half-black and half-Asian. "Half" isn't necessarily the best terminology; there are plenty of other possible ways to discuss multiracial identity that don't rely on it. (I generally don't care about the British royal family one way or the other, but I have appreciated the prominence of Meghan Markle because, while having the same ancestral mix as Obama does, she regularly describes herself as "biracial", not as "black".) But "half" is a hell of a lot better than an approach that takes it for granted that Harris gets to be both of her racial ancestries while Obama and Markle and I don't.

If you think it is an obvious truth that Harris is both black and Asian, and you want me to share your righteous indignation that Trump won't recognize that truth, then look me in the eye and tell me that you recognize that, in exactly the same way and to the same degree, Barack Obama and I are also white. Until you are ready to do that, I cannot take your indignation seriously. You haven't thought the issue through any more than Trump has.