After years of listening to Donald Trump’s schoolyard taunts, there’s a tendency to dismiss them as trivial nonsense. But all taunts are not created equal. Trump’s attempt to question whether Vice President Kamala Harris is Black is particularly vicious. Like many New Yorkers, I’m of mixed heritage, which also makes it personal. Far beyond the usual blathering, Trump’s line of attack is a sinister and divisive tactic rooted in a system of racial hierarchy. Within this hate-based, power-driven system, defining the personal identity of others is a matter of control, as well as a ploy to divide and conquer those under control. It’s important to understand the historical context here. During slavery, Black Americans were treated as property, not people, and were not even allowed to choose the names of their children. Our literal identity was controlled by others. That’s why many prominent civil rights leaders during the 1960s made a point of changing their names. Seizing control of one’s identity became central to the concept of personal freedom. That’s the historical thread running through Trump’s effort to control and define Harris’ identity. It’s not the first time he’s done this, either. The birtherism smear of former President Barack Obama — which Trump exploited to establish himself in national politics — was an effort to control the identity of our first Black president. Birtherism was fueled by right-wing demagogues, with the goal of defining Obama as something other, foreign, and not a part of our shared American story. As one of the first members of Congress to join both the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, I’ve had my own experience dealing with questions about my racial identity. I am Black with both Cape Verdean and Latino roots. In other words, Afro-Latino. My paternal grandfather’s family goes back to Cape Verde. My maternal grandfather’s family is from Latin America. My mother, whose maiden name is Gomez, lost her father when she was very young, making her own story of identity complex and multifaceted. Being of Mexican, Colombian, and Venezuelan descent is part of her identity, but she grew up at a time and in a place where most conversations about race were limited to being Black or white. For this reason, she identifies as a Black woman with Latino roots. Since being in political life, my racial identity has been scrutinized through the lens of racial hierarchy. During my first congressional campaign, my opposition sought to weaponize my Blackness in a 90% white and very rural district in Upstate New York, by launching racist attack ads about my time as a Hip-Hop artist. And when I was first named lieutenant governor, critics questioned whether I was Latino “enough.” The truth is that deploying such purity tests only advances the ends of a racial hierarchy designed to divide marginalized groups from within. Of course, I can’t reflect on this idea of identity without touching on the experience of my wife, Lacey Schwartz Delgado. Her critically-acclaimed documentary, “Little White Lie,” courageously unpacks a family secret hovering beneath the surface of her belief that she was a white Jewish girl, with two white Jewish parents. Ultimately, she learned that her biological father was Black. Lacey would struggle for many years living in what she calls a “racial closet,” where she would identify as Black and bi-racial in her day-to-day life, but not do the same when back home with her family. Making “Little White Lie” was Lacey’s way of making her way out of the racial closet. Today, we are raising our own biracial sons, two young Black men with Cape Verdean and Latino roots, in the Jewish faith. That is the story of our American family. In America, defining who we are is at the core of our personal freedom as individuals. That includes little things like choosing the type of music we listen to or the clothes we wear or how we cut our hair. It also includes bigger things like who we choose to love and how we choose to worship and what we choose to do with our own bodies. And it all starts with how we identify ourselves in this world, and the basic expectation that those around us will respect us for who we are. We all know that Donald Trump can be careless with his rhetoric, but his attack on the identity of Kamala Harris is not an accident. On this one, let’s take him seriously. Delgado is the lieutenant governor of New York.