Once again, Donald Trump exposed his ignorance of American history when he questioned whether Vice President Kamala Harris could consider herself Black.
Asking whether Harris is Black or Indian manifests a deep ignorance of how most U.S. states regrettably defined race by law for generations after the Civil War.
Louisiana, for example, wrote into law that anyone who was one-sixteenth Black was legally 100% Black. Skin color and DNA had nothing to do with it.
It was called the “one drop” rule.
After the Civil War, racists opposed to the end of slavery treated Black citizens despicably for nearly a century. But this wasn’t something new. A federal law dating to 1790 denied naturalized American citizenship to any group not “free white persons.” And in 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that Africans could never become citizens in the infamous Dredd Scott decision.
And it wasn’t just Blacks. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibiting immigration from China for ten years. It was extended and made permanent until World War II, when China was a war ally.
The Japanese were dealt with by President Teddy Roosevelt in 1908 in a “gentlemen’s agreement” that limited immigration to the U.S. Then the door was slammed shut by the ultra-racist Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 that ended immigration of Jews and others from Eastern Europe.
Mexicans were always a special case. The “free white persons” law was used by devious Americans who plotted to steal California land from the Mexican citizens who were in California prior to 1848.
The Mexican-American War, after all, was instigated by President James Polk to expand slavery into new territory. Polk lied to Congress about Mexican troops attacking Texas and demanded a declaration of war.
Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln exposed Polk’s lies by introducing “spot resolutions” demanding that Polk show Congress exactly where American troops were attacked. Polk couldn’t do it.
But Polk got his war. It ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which included a clause that any Mexican citizens inside ceded Mexican territory were automatically American citizens by staying put for a year after the treaty was ratified.
Fast forward 50 years. Through normal channels a Mexican named Rodriguez applied for citizenship in Texas in 1897. A group of white men contested the application, citing the 1790 “free white persons” law. They claimed that the Indian-heritage Rodriguez didn’t look white.
A Federal district court ruled that as thousands of Mexicans had been decreed citizens by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the “free white persons” limitation was no longer valid.
Likewise, Trump’s questioning of Vice President Harris’ racial composition isn’t legitimate. The question itself isn’t legitimate — it’s racist. In today’s America, race is how an individual defines it. Trump should know that.
Raoul Lowery Contreras is a Marine Corps veteran, political consultant, prolific author and host of the Contreras Report on YouTube and Facebook.
