Trump’s Remarks on Kamala Was Just Old Time Racism

 

By Lisa Lerer and Maya King

The New York Times

The audience of Black journalists was prepared for a combative exchange well before Donald J. Trump took the stage on Wednesday for an interview at their annual gathering in Chicago.

Yet when Mr. Trump, just minutes in, began questioning Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity, there was an instant ripple of reaction — a low rumble that grew into a roar of disapproval.

“I didn’t know she was Black until several 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?” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, whose mother was Indian American and whose father is Black.

The moment was shocking, but for those who have followed Mr. Trump’s divisive language, it was hardly surprising. The former president has a history of using race to pit groups of Americans against one another, amplifying a strain of racial politics that has risen as a generation of Black politicians has ascended. 

The audacity of Mr. Trump, a white man, questioning how much a Black woman truly belongs to Black America was particularly incendiary.

And it evoked an ugly history in this country, in which white America has often declared the racial categories that define citizens, and sought to determine who gets to call themselves what.

“Give me a break,” said Fred Sweets, a contributing editor at The St. Louis American who watched the discussion from the third row. “He seemed to be denigrating her background. She knows who she is.”

Ms. Harris has embraced her dual racial identities. She has long identified as Black and was shaped by several Black institutions. She graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C., and there joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black sorority. She has spoken extensively about growing up in what she described as a Black community in Berkeley, Calif.

“She had two Black babies, and she raised them to be two Black women,” Harris told The New York Times in a 2016 interview about her mother. 

On Wednesday evening, Ms. Harris responded to Mr. Trump’s comment at an event hosted by one of the nation’s most prominent Black sororities, saying they showed “divisiveness and disrespect.”

“The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth,” she said, making no direct reference to Mr. Trump’s personal attacks. “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us — they are an essential source of our strength.”

Attacks on Ms. Harris’s racial background have circulated among right-w

ing figures and Mr. Trump’s close allies for years.

In 2019, Donald Trump Jr. shared a social media post from an alt-right personality that falsely claimed Ms. Harris was not Black enough to be discussing the plight of Black Americans during a primary debate. Though Mr. Trump later deleted the post, it spread widely across conservative social media, prompting a wave of accounts to question her background, which was exactly the point of the effort, according to some far-right activists.

Donald Trump, left, sits in a chair speaking with Rachel Scott, right, who is also in a chair. She is wearing a blue suit, and he is wearing a dark suit and a red tie.

Donald J. Trump was interviewed during an appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists convention.Credit...Akilah Townsend for The New York Times

But the Republican nominee’s remarks on Wednesday were perhaps the most overt attack on her identity yet and seemed to be an effort to inject the fringe idea into the mainstream conversation about her bid.

“We’re saying this is shocking. He’ll probably put this in an ad saying how he went to talk to ‘the Blacks’ and how courageous that was,” said Cliff Albright, a liberal organizer and a co-founder of Black Voters Matter. “They’ll eat it up. He gets more out of this than we get out of it.”

Like many of Mr. Trump’s more provocative statements, the comments conveyed several unsettling ideas at once, all of them somewhat open to interpretation: He implied Ms. Harris was deceiving voters and selecting an identity for political gain. He suggested to the predominantly Black audience that she was not one of them — and to Indian Americans listening that she abandoned them, an assertion echoed by the onetime Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday.

Former President Barack Obama — the biracial son of a white mother and Black father — faced similar attacks.

For years, Mr. Trump and other Republicans spread conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama’s racial heritage with innuendo and lies about the authenticity of his birth certificate.

“Was it a birth certificate? You tell me,” Mr. Trump said in 2012, years before running to replace Mr. Obama in the White House. “Some people say that was not his birth certificate. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows.”

Mr. Obama’s citizenship was never in any doubt, as he had proved by releasing his entire birth certificate a year earlier. But Mr. Trump’s accusations were aimed at stoking suspicions and fears among white supporters who were all too eager to believe that Mr. Obama was born in Africa.

Throughout 2011, when he was first considering a foray into presidential politics, he repeated the lie about Mr. Obama over and over again, in tweets, speeches and interviews. He hinted at a conspiracy to cover up the truth and he repeatedly brushed aside evidence to the contrary, including the actual birth certificate. And it was effective, to a degree that stunned even Mr. Trump’s political advisers: His popularity among hard-core Republican voters soared. 

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump seemed to see similar political opportunities in the moment. In the hours after he questioned Ms. Harris’s identity, he repeated the claim in a Truth Social post. A headline noting Ms. Harris was California’s “first Indian American U.S. Senator” was projected on a large screen above the stage at his Pennsylvania rally on Wednesday evening.

And across social media platforms, Trump supporters circulated questions about whether her race was mentioned on her birth certificate — a throwback to the attacks they once leveled against Mr. Obama.

Yet, with Ms. Harris, such attacks could land differently. Mr. Obama ran as a candidate whose success would signal the arrival of a post-racial America. In her first presidential campaign in 2019, Ms. Harris announced her candidacy on the holiday of Martin Luther King’s Birthday and ran as an heir to Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to seek the Democratic presidential nomination.

In addition, Mr. Obama, the son of a white, Midwestern mother and Kenyan father, who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, hit fewer of the Black cultural touch points than Ms. Harris.

“Obama’s background was a little unusual so people had to remind themselves that there are 55 million ways to be Black in America,” said Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University, who specializes in Black politics.

“I don’t think that anybody has ever questioned her embrace of her Black identity in the same way.”

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting from Washington and Marc Lacey from Chicago.

Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades. More about Lisa Lerer

Maya King is a politics reporter covering the Southeast, based in Atlanta. She covers campaigns, elections, and movements in the American South, as well as national trends relating to Black voters and young people.