It wasn’t a debate. It was train wreck interview, and no one from Donald Trump’s party has called on him to step out of the presidential race — but they should.
The former president characterized Vice President Kamala Harris as a woman who can’t be trusted based on her mixed racial background during a livestreamed appearance in Chicago for the annual meeting of the National Assn. of Black Journalists.
“[Kamala] was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said of his likely opponent in the 2024 presidential election.
Harris’ mother is South Asian and her father is Black. It’s still a bit much for Trump to process, though he tried in real time to weaponize this information for his first big showing since Harris became his probable competition in the presidential race.
“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?” he asked. “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went … she became a Black person. I think somebody should look into that too.”
Look into what, exactly? And does this critical investigation require a DNA test, a lie detector test, or both? What is so hard about mixed heritage to understand here?
Trump stopped short of using terms like “half-breed” or “unpure,” but the message was clear: mixed-race folks and those of multiple ethnicities are oddball anomalies, flip-floppers who must pick one identity to be trusted. Even then, their birthplace, citizenship and religious beliefs will be dissected and scrutinized by the birther movement he spearheaded against Barack Obama nearly a decade ago.
Race baiting and hating is nothing new to MAGA, of course, but it was still stunning to hear it come out of a presidential candidate’s mouth on a national stage with such confidence and candor.
For those of us who grew up in “mixed” households, the demand that we stay in one lane is not new, but it’s still absurd. Personally, I’m moving between outrage and disappointment that we’re still having these sorts of midcentury conversations in 2024.
Explaining who or what you are to hostile interrogators (i.e., teachers, school bullies) is exhausting, especially as a kid. It certainly was to me. I hoped the world would change in time for my son, who is Arab, Indian and white.
Portraying Harris as The Other in front of a room full of Black journalists Wednesday backfired big time. His attempt to sow doubt about Harris’ blackness, in front of a predominantly Black audience, didn’t appear to win hearts and minds.
There were groans from the audience when he proclaimed he was the best president for Black people since Abraham Lincoln, and when he accused Rachel Scott of ABC News (one of three female interviewers on stage) of giving him a “very rude introduction.” Her tough first questions about his criticisms of Black journalists, Black prosecutors and communities in general were apparently “nasty.”
That sort of speak is ear-candy in the MAGA-verse, where elected officials resurrect Jim Crow-era descriptors like “colored” and use terms like “DEI hire” to discredit Harris. The latter smear suggests that she was picked for VP not because of her accomplishments as California’s attorney general or as a U.S. senator, but because she checks a few demographic boxes. But the GOP’s desperate scramble for a winning screed against Harris is not taking hold yet, at least not in the same way the age card was used against President Biden when he was in the race.
Still, Trump doubled down on his “You can’t trust her” banter via his Truth Social platform. “Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black,” he wrote. “This is a big deal. Stone cold phony.” Or perhaps it’s that she’s a threat to Trump’s world order.
Harris is the daughter of, wait for it, immigrants! Her father is Jamaican and her mother is Indian. She attended Howard University, a historically Black university and she pledged to the historically Black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. As a U.S. senator representing California, Harris was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Harris addressed Trump’s attacks from where she was speaking on Wednesday — the historically African American sorority Sigma Gamma Rho’s 60th International Biennial Boule.
“It was the same old show: the divisiveness, and the disrespect,” Harris said. “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us — they are an essential source of our strength.”
Harris is right. Those of us from mixed parentage already know this, even if Trump wants to portray that truth as a weakness.