Donald Trump and his Republican allies are doubling down on his attack line that Kamala Harris isn't truly Black or doesn't belong to Black America, a claim that elicited gasps at the National Association of Black Journalists panel that the former president attended on Wednesday.
"I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said of Harris, whose father is a Black man from Jamaica and whose mother is Indian-American.
After the panel, Trump led a boisterous rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where a large screen projected a Business Insider headline from 2017 reading: "Kamala Harris becomes first Indian-American U.S. Senator," with the seeming implication that the mixed-race vice president could not claim more than one identity. Alina Habba, an Arab-American woman who is a senior advisor to Trump, then declared in a speech that, "Unlike you, Kamala, I know who my roots are, I know where I come from."
Contrary to accusations that she ever downplayed her Black heritage, Harris has in fact talked about growing up in a Black-majority neighborhood in Oakland, California, singing in a children's choir in an African-American church and attending Howard University, a historically black college where she joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, a Black sorority.
In 2020, the Trump campaign itself sought to rebut charges of racial bias by noting the the former president had previously backed Harris when she was California's attorney general, a spokesperson stating that "Kamala Harris is a Black woman and he donated to her campaign, so I hope we can squash this racism argument now."
As Trump rallied supporters in Harrisburg on Wednesday night, Harris herself took the stage at the Black sorority Sigma Gamma Rho’s 60th International Biennial Bouléin in Houston, Texas, to clap back at her rival.
“This afternoon, Donald Trump spoke at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, and it was the same old show: the divisiveness and the disrespect," Harris said. "And let me just say, the American people deserve better. The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us – they are an essential source of our strength.”
Some pro-Trump accounts, including the far-right activist Laura Loomer, have also circulated what they claim to be Harris' birth certificate on social media, pointing out that her father identified as "Jamaican" rather than "Black," even though he, like most other Jamaicans, descended from enslaved Africans. One common refrain in those circles is that Harris is descended from a white slave-owner, which other users have pointed out reflects the fact that those slave-owners were often serial rapists.
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The right-wing attacks on Harris' race, evocative of a long history in which white America has constructed racial categories and decided who belongs in them, appear designed to characterize Harris as a phony and pit racial groups against each other. On his website, Truth Social, Trump followed his Wednesday afternoon comments with a post highlighting Harris' 2020 appearance on a cooking show hosted by Indian-American comedian Mindy Kaling in which the two discussed their South Asian heritage.
But even some Republicans appear concerned that such incendiary attacks will backfire.
"I ain't getting involved in that. Let him talk about what he wants to talk about. I'm talking about how bad our country is in shape right now because of her," said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Al., who like many other members of his party have declined to explicitly criticize their nominee.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., tried to pin the blame both sides, saying that it is "not a great idea for either of the parties to be playing racial identity politics."
GOP leaders were already worried that accusations of Harris being a "DEI hire" would alienate the party from Black voters; while Trump relentlessly blamed Democrats for mishandling the American economy throughout Joe Biden's presidency, the emergence of Harris as the presumptive nominee has drawn out a different kind of impulse from him and the right.
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