“Is she Indian or is she Black?” Donald Trump asked July 31, questioning current Vice President Kamala Harris’ race at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention. The eldest members of my family discussed Trump’s speech incredulously. Initially, I thought my family’s anger was directed toward the former president. Instead, it was directed toward the current vice president. Why were they so angry? What did Harris do that was so wrong? Exist.

There is a worldwide classification system based on having a singular identity. It restricts and controls everything that is heterogeneous, forcing it into a homogeneous binary, and race is a prime example. Individuals not of one race inherently challenge this classification used to organize and control a population. If you identify as more than one race, you face pressure to choose only one, denying the other parts of who you are. Multiracialism finds no place in a racial hierarchy with white at its peak, and, as a result, multiracial individuals are robbed of autonomy by the pressure to conform to this one-race system.

Harris’ mere existence threatens this system. She must either be Indian “OR” Black, not “AND.” She is held to the standards of others regarding when to display her races. This mindset that people can only have one race is perpetuated on an individual level, such as my family’s anger that Harris doesn’t simplify her identity into just one race. It is also present on a systemic level, like how the U.S. Census Bureau didn’t allow participants to select more than one race as a response until 2000. This issue is larger than my family, the former president and even the United States.

Identity relies on self-definition. An identity is brought to existence by how an individual chooses to acknowledge it. Identity does not, and should not, exist as a mechanism of control, the way it does in American politics today.