When Donald Trump questioned Vice-President Kamala Harris’s biracial identity on Wednesday, not many people were surprised — including Harris herself. On Wednesday night, Harris responded to the vile attacks, saying Trump was trafficking in the same dishonest rhetoric he always does.
“It was the same old show — the divisiveness and the disrespect,” Harris said at an event in Houston as the audience laughed and booed Trump. “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.”
Earlier in the day, Trump attended the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago, where he boldly — and falsely — claimed that Harris used to identify as Indian until “all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she became a Black person.” He went on to say, “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.” Harris’s father is Jamaican and her mother is Indian; she also attended a historically Black university and is a member of the country’s oldest Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.
Trump attacking the heritage and Americanness of candidates of color is nothing new. After all, this is the same man who spent years promoting racist conspiracy theories falsely alleging that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. He also falsely suggested that his 2016 presidential rival Ted Cruz wasn’t eligible to run because he was born in Canada to an American mother, and earlier this year, he reposted a report that incorrectly claimed his opponent Nikki Haley’s parents weren’t American citizens when she was born.
Let’s hope someone in the Trump camp can explain to him how interracial marriages and mixed-race children work, considering that they make up an increasing portion of the American population. Maybe his white running mate J.D. Vance, who has an Indian American wife and three biracial children, can get on the case.
