Did Trump Attack Kamala’s Ethnicity?
For the very first time since she was announced as the new Democratic nominee for the upcoming elections, Kamala Harris addressed head-on the false claims made by Donald Trump regarding her racial identity, but also as the former president’s history of racial division throughout his public life.
During their fresh presidential debate, Trump was asked why he felt comfortable during a recent appearance at a conference of Black journalists to falsely claim that the vice president all of a sudden “turned black” after she emphasized until then that she has a South Asian heritage.
Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, rejected the premise that she had to defend her own racial identity. However, Trump, standing a couple of feet away from Harris, claimed he no longer cared about the topic. “I don’t care what she is” he explained. “I couldn’t care less. Whatever she wants to be is fine with me.”
He then proceeded to repeat a series of falsehoods about Harris’ identity, stating that all he can say is that he read somewhere that she’s not really black, and how then he read that she is, in fact, black, and how both these scenarios are fine with him.
In a more recent, televised interview as the Democratic nominee, a CNN journalist asked Harris to respond to Trump’s remarks about her race. She rapidly dismissed his comments as being part of the “same old playbook.” But on Tuesday, she took the time to actually address them directly.
“Honestly, I must say it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president, who has consistently, over many years, attempted to use race to divide the American people,” Harris stated. Then she fit Trump’s comments into her broader critique of the former president, who her campaign has cast as being divisive and backward-looking in a nation that’s simply tired of bombast.
As Harris would be a pioneering candidate, she would be elected as the nation’s first woman of color president. However, her campaign decided to downplay this particular framing, focusing instead on themes of freedom and unity.
As she explained many times, Harris believes that the vast majority of American people know that they have much more in common than what would otherwise be seen as divisive themes, and no one needs this kind of approach that’s continuously trying to divide us, especially when it comes to race.
Then, she proceeded to remind the audience about Trump’s decades-long history of racial division, circling back to when the Justice Department investigated both him and his father, Fred Trump Sr., for refusing to rent to Black tenants.
Then, she mentioned that he called for the death penalty for the “Central Park Five”, Black and Latino youths who were unjustly accused of rape in New York City in the late ’80s, which Trump defended in a short rebuttal.
If you found this article interesting, we also recommend checking our latest take on the presidential debate that took place a few days ago: Kamala vs Trump Debate: Trump Loses Both the Debate and His Temper
