I try to avoid writing too much about American politics. Not because it is uninteresting, but because we should focus our energies on the rest of the world, where the majority of the world’s people live. The Anglophone club of nations is overwhelmingly dominated by the North Americanisation of culture, and this skews our understanding of global politics. As American media companies have gone global, they have promoted a vision of the world that asserts the primacy of US politics and culture.

Let’s consider the following; Brazil, India, Russia and China combined constitute the majority of the global population. Their economic and cultural assertiveness is increasing, and we in Australia would be foolish to ignore it.

Having acknowledged the above, we can say that we cannot be indifferent to the American elections and their choice of leadership. The United States financial oligarchy exerts an inordinate influence on the global financial architecture, and the persons who make economic and political decisions have consequences for the rest of us.

Of course we must evaluate US candidates by the policies they advocate. However, there are decisions in the US political process which expose the kind of priorities that undergird American capitalist society.

There has been a tsunami of commentary on the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and I do not wish to recycle all that information here. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Trump was asked by African American journalists what he thought of Kamala Harris.

He questioned her identity – ‘is she Indian or black?’ He went on to ask ‘when did she turn black?’ Gasps from the audience indicated the outrage at his sneering comments. But this incident indicates a deeper malaise.

His obnoxious remarks about a mixed race person are woefully ignorant. But they are not out of place in American society. Trump is uninformed about race and racial politics – but that is not his fault. His idiocy is the product of American capitalism’s obsessive quest to compartmentalise people into fixed, allegedly immutable biological categories called races.

Races are definitely are real, and part of the wider society, but they are not genetically based. Races are socially and ideologically constructed divisions, and racism is all too real.

Let’s unravel this multifaceted topic.

Harris is an intelligent, confident strong biracial woman – a refreshing change from the obnoxious MAGA cesspit, which consists of has-been faker celebrities, washed up ex-actors, white supremacist weasels and vacuous talking heads who substitute political analysis with conspiracy theories.

Kamala has discussed and written about her background on numerous occasions. Her father was a Jamaican born man, who came to the United States to study economics at Berkeley campus. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, from the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, arrived at Berkeley to study biochemistry. She became a biomedical scientist.

Harris spoke about the intellectual impact on her parents of both being born in former British colonies. Berkeley campus was a melting pot of student activism and radical politics. This was a place where the working class Left and radical black antiracist civil rights movements overlapped. Political discussions about racism, imperialism and anticolonialism were common.

There was no artificial debate or barriers erected between ‘class vs race’ into which the contemporary Trotskyist Left frequently deteriorates. (For the record, I have decades of experience in the Trotskyist Left, so apologies in advance to comrades and friends).

The 1960s was an era of the One drop rule – a policy which dated from the anti-miscegenation laws of the early 1600s, when America was still a series of British colonies. Preserving whiteness was an obsessive concern of the slaver-plantation squattocracy, so a person was considered black if they had even one African American ancestor.

Race, a purely subjective perception, became encoded into the legal and economic framework of American capitalism. Being of mixed race, or biracial, presented a problem. How much blackness makes a person black? One parent? One grandparent? This is the mess US capitalism has got itself in, because it cannot handle the reality of mixed ethnicities.

Halle Berry, the famous actor, is herself biracial, and chooses to identify as black. No one can question her choice, but then a question arises – what about her daughter Nahla? Is she 75 percent white? Or should she be pigeonholed into the category of blackness?

Harris’ parents divorced, and Kamala was raised by her mother, in conjunction with friends and neighbours in an extended network of support. Gopalan taught her children the importance of education, integrity, cooperation, respect for people regardless of ethnic background, family values.

Here is another talking point that MAGA Republicans fail to understand – a single mother understands the importance of family, and taught family values to her children, in a web of community relationships. The term family values need not be a code word for social conservatism.

With the selection of Tim Walz as Harris’ running mate, now we can begin the difficult and rigorous discussion about the policies for which Kamala stands. Let’s not descend into a lovefest for the Harris-Walz campaign ticket. Harris has the backing of venture capitalists and Silicon Valley tech giants. This undoubtedly will influence her political decisions.

Harris has spoken about building bridges with big business, policies that continue the practices of the Biden administration. Being friendly to hydraulic fracturing (fracking), an environmentally destructive process of mining makes Harris appealing to the large energy companies. As attorney general in California, Harris continued to incarcerate African Americans in huge numbers, and defied attempts to reduce the overall prison population.

Another Trump presidency is a horrific scenario to contemplate. His racism makes him reprehensible. We can defend Harris against the obnoxious and insidious attacks against her background and character by the MAGA Republicans, and maintain a vigorously critical examination of her party’s policies.