Hello and welcome to the LA Times politics newsletter. I'm Shelby Grad, deputy news editor, filling in for David Lauter today.

Generational change

Thirty years ago, the Los Angeles Times asked Orange County residents, Interracial dating and relationships. The poll found strong support among young people, with nearly 60% of 18- to 34-year-olds saying they had dated someone from another racial or ethnic group.

Orange County is just beginning to shed its image as a conservative, white bastion, and the survey highlights stark divisions between older and younger generations.

“My boyfriend is Latino,” a white banker from Fullerton told the paper. “My parents never opposed it, but my grandparents don't.”

Though I was still a junior reporter in the newsroom when the poll was released, I remember being struck by its results — and that sentiment came to represent the way a new generation of Californians defined their experience, with a belief that racial mixing was not just our strength but our secret weapon.

Today, almost 16% of Californians There are candidates of more than one race, including a woman who is likely to be the Democratic presidential nominee.

The 78-year-old man's recent comments questioning Kamala Harris's multiracial identity could easily be dismissed as the outdated ideas of a previous generation, but the man who made them was Donald Trump, and his comments had a political purpose.

Trump falsely claimed that Harris “started out as Indian and then suddenly changed her tune and became black.”

Since his comments, made on Wednesday during a session with three reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists' annual conference, news outlets have thoroughly debunked and dissected the credibility of his statements.

Childhood in California

But perhaps it's more instructive to hear Harris in her own words about what it was like growing up a mixed-race Californian, born in Oakland to an Indian mother and Jamaican father.

“I knew my Indian mother was raising two black daughters,” Harris said. Michael Finnegan of The Times in 2019“But that doesn’t exclude my identity in terms of my Indian heritage.

“I grew up going to a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple,” she explained.

She spoke of her family's visits to India and her rich childhood listening to Aretha Franklin's gospel song “Young, Gifted and Black” as the soundtrack to her adolescence growing up in a middle-class black neighborhood in a Berkeley apartment.

Explaining your identity to others

Harris goes even deeper During an interview on the “Asian Enough” podcast In 2020, he spoke with Frank Chillon and Jen Yamada about the difficulty of explaining one's identity to strangers.

“It asks you to explain things about yourself that you normally wouldn't have to explain, which can be difficult for a variety of reasons, like maybe in that moment you think an interview about your economic plans would have been better,” she said with a laugh, “But even if you're very happy with yourself, you're still trying to get people to understand who you are as a person.”

Harris said she understands the need to make herself known to voters, especially those who may not have been exposed to California's diversity.

“So when you don't fit into someone's preconceived notion of who is the president of the United States, when their only criteria is who has been the president of the United States, and there's not a single person among them that doesn't look like you, it becomes difficult,” she told Shion and Yamada.

But Harris stressed that such suffering was never her own.

“I've never had an identity crisis,” she said, adding, “The frustration I feel is that people assume I had one and that I needed to explain it away.”

And she attributes that distinct identity in part to growing up in the Bay Area: “There were so many different cultures in that community. … It wasn't an issue for me.”

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Until next time,
Shelby Grad

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