I was running to be president, not to be an American history professor. It wasn’t my duty to school the former president on America’s racial history—the one-drop rule; the one-eighth law—and how this history had been, and still is, weaponized. When my mother came alone to this country from India as a nineteen-year-old student in 1958, there were still very few South Asians in the United States. She knew that with a Black Jamaican-born father, Americans would see us as Black children. She raised Maya and me to be proud Black women. I could hear my mother’s stern voice: “Kamala, don’t ever let
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