I hate ice cream shops. It is not that I do not like ice cream; on the contrary, I love it. The issue is these days, they overwhelm you with a plethora of flavors. Often, in my indecision about what flavor to choose, I will choose some sort of mix. Perhaps it’s a swirl of chocolate and vanilla at the soft serve machine in some buffet, or two scoops of completely different kinds at that mom-and-pop ice cream shop. In my mind, this ice cream is not simply one flavor or simply the other – it’s a combination enriched by virtue of being a mix of two distinct tastes.
Reducing a hybrid or mix to one of its components is not just reductive and degrading – it is also dumb. Imagine someone referred to the chocolate-vanilla swirl offered at many soft serve machines as just plain vanilla. Not only would it be a gross reduction of something that is 50 percent non-vanilla, but it would also be stupid. How could you not have the mental capacity to grasp that something can be half vanilla and half chocolate?
This is the same way I view the debate regarding Kamala Harris’s race. She is, in extremely simple terms, black AND South Asian. Some aspects of her life and culture may have been more reflective of her black heritage, while other parts may have been indicative of her South Asian heritage, leading to a person with a unique life experience that cannot be neatly pigeonholed into one race or the other.
She undoubtedly has life experiences which can cause her to relate to people who are 100-percent black. I can confirm she has mentioned events I can relate to, as someone who is 100-percent South Asian.
Additionally, I am willing to bet she has gone through things that people of just one race will never relate to.
Thus, Donald Trump’s inability to realize this is reflective of his child-like intelligence (I apologize to children who feel insulted by my comparison). A man who cannot grasp the simplicity of the idea that Harris is a person of mixed races and therefore mixed experiences cannot grasp any level of nuance inherent in any aspect of the job of being the president.
You can see this inability reflected in other Trump policies. He thinks he can simply talk Ukraine out of defending their home. He thinks he can simply get another country to pay for a border wall. He thinks he can simply eliminate the Affordable Care Act without a viable replacement. He thinks he can get rid of agencies like the FBI and EPA and all the problems they deal with will disappear into thin air.
I feel like none of these are as egregiously simple-minded as his reduction of Kamala Harris’s race, but they, in total, illustrate Donald Trump’s incompetence. Combined with other comments about Harris’s supposed anti-Semitism (since there is of course no anti-Semite as extreme as the type who marries a Jewish person) and her inability to care about the future due to the fact she is childless (because we all know stepchildren are not real children), Donald Trump understands people less than I did when I was 10.
At that age, I had relatives and friends who were mixed-race, part of interracial marriages or were stepchildren/stepparents themselves. All of them cared about the future – of their families, of their communities and of their countries. All of them identified as being the intersection of their various identities – not simply one or the other. Most importantly, all of them recognized each other as not being simply the product of one trait or circumstance, but rather several, and they all valued each other more, not less, for it.
Janagan Ramanathan is a Sartell High School alum, former U.S. Naval Academy midshipman and current aerospace engineering major at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
