Trump questions Kamala Harris’ racial identity…
In light of Joe Biden stepping out as a candidate in the upcoming presidential election and Veep Kamala Harris ascending into that role and the Democrat’s reinvigorated hopes to win in November… public opinion polls are showing newfound enthusiasm for her candidacy among voters of color and younger voters… Donald Trump, in what was most probably an attempt to court the minority vote, especially the votes of Black people, appeared at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention in Chicago last week and was interviewed by a panel that included ABC News’ Rachel Scott, Semafor’s Kadia Goba and Fox News’ Harris Faulkner and he “answered” a wide range of their questions that about his opinions on various social and political issues as well as probable policies if he was to be elected in November.
ABC’s Scott started off the interview by listing a litany of claims that Trump has publicly issued about various rivals he has had during his political career and on the campaign trail when she said, “You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals, from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States, which is not true. You have told four congresswomen of color, who were American citizens, to go back to where they came from. You have used words like ‘animal’ and ‘rabid’ to describe Black district attorneys. You have attacked Black journalists, calling them a ‘loser,’ saying the questions they ask are, quote, ‘stupid’ and ‘racist.’ You’ve had dinner with a White supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort…”
And then she asked… “So my question, sir… now that you are asking Black supporters to vote for you, why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?”
In a roundabout rambling response that first insulted and questioned the integrity of the interrogator… Ms. Scott… and her employer…. ABC News… when he said the question was “horrible,” “hostile” and a “disgrace” and described ABC as a “fake” network, he went on to avoid answering the question directly y spewing out some of his past false and divisive claims that included the blatant lie that he was “…the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.” And then he ridiculously and inanely spouted out a line from the June debate with Biden where he claimed that migrants crossing the U.S. southern border would take away “Black jobs.”
Scott asked, “What exactly is a ‘Black job,’ sir?”
Interestingly he answered, “A Black job is anybody with a job.”
When a follow up question asked Trump whether he agreed with some fellow Republicans who have been saying Harris, who has had a distinguished lifetime of public service (District Attorney of San Francisco and Attorney General of California, to serving as a United States Senator and as the Vice President of the country) is nothing more than a “DEI hire…”
DEI standing for “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives aimed at increasing representation of women and people of color in the workforce to address longstanding inequities and discrimination with “DEI hire” being derisively used to suggest someone is not qualified for their job and was only chosen on the basis of race or gender… or both.
Trump answered , “I don’t know.” And then went on to shock the audience who issued a distinct gasp, when he falsely suggested that his Democratic rival Kamala Harris had previously downplayed her Black heritage as he said,
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. 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?”
As a smattering of jeers from the thousand or so folks in attendance died down he went on to say… “But you know what, I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went… she became a Black person.”
First… Harris, who is of Indian and Jamaican heritage, has long self-identified as both Black and Asian. Simply put, she is the first Black person and Asian American person to ever serve as the vice president of the United States.
Second… Trump was questioning Harris’ right to belong to more than one racial and/or ethnic group. He was deliberately “misunderstanding” a person’s freedom as well as their right, to identify as more than a solitary racial group, or in Harris’ situation two races and he was doing it for his own political gain and what he hoped would be in the form of votes come November. As bluntly as I can say it…
Trump was trying to drive a wedge between Black voters and Harris by instilling doubt in her Black bona fides.
Ashley Ramchandani, a 36-year-old who works in local government in Illinois, who like Harris, is Black and Indian told the Washington Post ,”(He is) using something that’s divisive within the community to his own advantage. He was saying to those Black journalists, ‘She’s not one of you,’ and that is not his place to say.”
However Trump was also preaching to his MAGA crowd…
Justin Jones, a Tennessee House representative, who is Black and Filipino, “He’s trying to evoke some very painful, very sinister, elements of American history. It’s clear that the audience was not the people in the room, but the white nationalists in his base, for whom racism is red meat that they feed on.”
Unsurprisingly, the Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment on what took place and was said during his time at the NABJ convention.
When the Washington Post contacted Nitasha Tamar Sharma, a professor of Black and Asian American studies at Northwestern University, about Trump’s comments, she hit the nail on its blunted little head when she said, “Trump was really relying on stereotypes of multiracial people as disloyal and inauthentic, as not having a core identity, and stoking people’s suspicions of multiracial people.”
Sharma added that America is at a racial crossroads not unlike the one that took place during Obama’s first presidential election.
And after the Rev. Adam Shoemaker… an Episcopal priest who lives in South Carolina whose father is Egyptian and his mother is White… heard Trump question Vice President Harris’s identity as a Black and South Asian American woman this week, he immediately remembered how he grew up struggling with feeling like he didn’t fit fully into one group or the other. Trump’s words reminded him that some Americans still think he should have to choose. Shoemaker says, “I don’t think that anybody should presume to racially identify or categorize another human being. And I think that is an inherently racist thing to do because it discounts another human being’s reality.”
Amen to that.
But Trump appearing at the NABJ And opening his racist yap may have just lit a possible fire under what could be a very significant demographic that could very well decide the upcoming presidential election.
Very simply… Trump’s racist comments in questioning Harris’ racial identity woke up some painful memories for America’s fastest-growing racial group… i.e., people who identify as belonging to more than one race.
More than 33 million Americans. about one out of every ten people in America… identify as two or more races. And it is a group that is growing and most likely will never stop growing… according to the 2020 Census almost 33% of Americans who identify as multiracial are younger than 18 up from single digits from the last Census.
So go right on ahead Trump, as well as all of his dedicated and devoted maggot peeps, keep right ahead pissing off the largest demographic and growing population of multiracial folks in this country and driving them to question just exactly why they should vote for you when you belittle and lie about one of their own in Kamala Harris.
Another thousand words…
