Not Breaking News: Kamala Harris Is Black. Donald Trump Is Racist.
And that's the end of that chapter.
Vice President Kamala Harris is set to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee — a historic moment that Donald Trump and an obliging media couldn’t help co-opting with Trump’s vicious racism.
Trump appeared for a Q&A in Chicago at the National Association of Black Journalists. He was predictably rude and hostile toward the Black woman, ABC’s Rachel Scott, who asked him substantive questions. (That’s a pattern.) Scott did an excellent job against Trump. She challenged him on his documented history of racist statements, which too many journalists just ignore. She cornered the convicted felon into admitting that he’d pardon the January 6 insurrectionists who’ve been convicted of assaulting police officers.
Aaron Rupar at
put together a literal gag reel of the interview, which you can watch below.When asked about his Democratic opponent, Trump could only respond with nouveau birtherism:
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? I respect either one. (He does not — SER) But she obviously doesn't because she was Indian all the way and then all of the sudden made a turn and she went — she became a Black person.
Along with 33.8 million other Americans, Kamala Harris is biracial. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was South Asian, and her father, Donald J. Harris, is Jamaican. Far-right activist Laura Loomer posted a copy of the vice president’s birth certificate, supposedly as the “a ha!” moment when a detective exposes the killer.
Loomer lives in Florida, which has the nation’s second-largest Jamaican population, but she’s apparently too stupid to realize Jamaica is not Sweden.
There’s a lot that Trump hasn’t known “until a number of years ago,” like the name Frederick Douglass or that people exist when he’s not looking at them. However, Harris didn’t suddenly become Black for fame and fortune, like a racist 1980s movie. She’s always been Black and deeply invested in the Black community. Here’s a key passage from a 2019 New Yorker profile:
Growing up, Harris was surrounded by African-American intellectuals and activists. One of her mother’s closest friends was Mary Lewis, who helped found the field of black studies, at San Francisco State. When Gopalan worked late at the lab, Kamala spent time with her “second mother”—Regina Shelton, who ran a day care in the apartment below theirs, decorated with posters of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. Harris writes that Gopalan “knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”
During a 2019 interview on The Breakfast Club, Harris told co-host Charlagmane tha God, “I’m Black, and I’m proud of being Black. I was born Black. I will die Black, and I'm not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”
Put that on a t-shirt.
When Harris ran for California attorney general in 2010, CNN described her as a “female Obama.” Her own campaign literature stated that if elected, Harris would be the “first female, first African-American, the first Asian-American attorney general in California and the first South Asian-American attorney general in the nation.” Trump later donated to Harris’s 2014 re-election campaign.
People with a lot of time on their hands have speculated on Trump’s motives. Perhaps he’s making Harris’s racial background an issue so he can weaken her support among certain Black men who think she’s not “really” Black. She even has a white Jewish husband, who radio host Sid Rosenberg called a “crappy Jew.” (Trump agreed with the jerk.) I have a finite lifespan, however, so I’m sticking with Occam’s Burning Cross: Trump is a racist who hates Black people, especially women. writes that Trump is “a fascist, he believes that only white people—or more specifically, only his own white cishet Christian male voters—are authentic and real. Everyone else, to Trump, is fake and inauthentic.”
Trump dominates the GOP because his blatant racism seamlessly gels with their overall philosophy. A small number of Republicans have privately expressed their displeasure with Trump’s “embarrassing remarks,” but even fewer have made any public statements. Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who’s running for Senate, posted on social media, “It's unacceptable and abhorrent to attack Vice President Harris or anyone’s racial identity. The American people deserve better.” Hogan lacks the courage, however, to mention Trump’s name.
The Most Directly Racist Presidential Campaign In History
Lakshya Jain at Split Ticket posted on social media that “this election is shaping up to be, by some distance, the most directly racist presidential campaign I have seen in my lifetime.” Yes, he’s aware of Willie Horton, but this time a Black woman is actually at the top of the ticket and her opponent is a barely sentient Klan robe.
Republicans used dog whistles against Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, but it was nothing like this. John McCain famously corrected a supporter who said, “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and … he’s an Arab.” McCain responded, “No, ma’am … He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that just I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what the campaign’s all about.” (Some liberals scoffed at McCain’s apparent implication that an Arab couldn’t be a “decent family man,” but I’ve always thought that was an unfair reading.)
Mitt Romney, in 2012, publicly denounced ads that highlighted Obama’s ties to his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “I want to make it very clear I repudiate that effort,” Romney told reporters. “I think it’s the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign. I hope that our campaigns can respectively be about the future and about issues and about a vision for America.”
Trump isn’t like the previous Republican presidential nominees. He’s the racist old lady at the McCain town hall. So, of course, he doubled-down on his racist attack. Not long after he fled the NABJ interview early like a coward, Trump shared a 2019 video of Harris cooking Indian food with actor Mindy Kaling. “Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black,” the deranged bigot wrote. “This is a big deal. Stone cold phony. She uses everybody, including her racial identity.”
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk posted this exchange from the video, which is charming but he believes is damning because squirrels are holding Olympic games inside his skull.
MINDY KALING: Okay. So what we’re going to cook today is an Indian recipe. Because you are Indian.
KAMALA: Yes, yes, yes, okay.
MINDY KALING: Actually, we’re both South Indian.
You see, while the Black woman was conning the world into thinking she’s Black, a race that commands one out of 46 presidents, she simultaneously released a video on her own YouTube channel celebrating her South Indian heritage. Her ridiculously circuitous plan was now one quarter complete!
Trump later posted an old family photo of Harris, who’s wearing a sari, with the caption: “Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago! Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated.”
Republicans have tried to spin this racist bile into political gold. Maybe they can paint Harris as an unreliable flip-flopper like John Kerry. Of course, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance isn’t the best messenger for this line of attack, considering how suddenly he shifted from an anti-Trump conservative to a drooling MAGA stooge. Neither is Trump, actually, because he was once a pro-choice Democrat who donated to biracial attorney general candidates.
Nonetheless, Vance — who has Trump’s enthusiastic seal of “meh” — smeared Harris as a phony Wednesday night at a rally where the applause sign probably deserved hazard pay. I won’t subject you to moving images of J.D. Vance, but here are Harris’s full Atlanta rally remarks.
“Kamala Harris went down to Georgia and started with a fake Southern accent,” Vance said. “What the hell was all that about? She grew up in Canada. They don’t talk like that in Vancouver or Quebec or wherever she came from.”
Harris was born in Oakland, California, which was almost 50 percent Black when she was a child. (Gentrification has brought that down to about 21 percent today, but that’s still almost double the national percentage.) This is like questioning the Southern bonafides of someone born in Mobile, Alabama. Harris’s family spent some time in the midwest before Harris, her mother, and sister moved back to California and settled in a Berkeley neighborhood so Black she was bused to school as part of a desegregation program. She did spend six years in Montreal, which Vance couldn’t bother to Google, after which she attended Howard, the historically Black college in Washington, D.C. Pictures of her from this period look like a cast photo from A Different World.
Harris seemingly predicted this nonsense in 2019 when she told Charlagmane tha God, “So I was born in Oakland and raised in the United States except for the years that I was in high school in Montreal, Canada. And, look, this is the same thing they did to Barack (Obama). This is not new to us. And so, I think that we know what they are trying to do.”
Earlier, Vance claimed Trump’s racist insults merely called out Harris’s “chameleon-like” nature. Comparing someone to a chameleon suggests that they’re an opportunist who has willingly chosen to alter themselves. That more correctly applies to Vance himself. Actual chameleons change colors to blend into their environment as a survival instinct, which more accurately explains why some Black people “passed” as white or why Black people today code-switch.
The code-switching especially irritates racist white people, who argue that it’s pandering and disingenuous. (They probably just hate feeling left out of some “secret” language.) People have pointed out that Vance is married to a woman of Indian descent and his children are biracial. However, white conservatives are big into racial assimilation. They see whiteness as an exclusive club. If you’re white, membership is your birthright, and tentative membership is extended to non-white people willing to de-emphasize if not outright reject their ethnic background. Tim Scott attended a mostly white Christian college and described in his memoir how he “heard the N-word many times off and on campus.” He often presents the racism he’s endured as evidence of his own perseverance — not an institutional problem the nation and white people specifically should confront and actively resolve. This is also true of fellow South Carolinian Nikki Haley, who insists that America has “never been a racist country.”
Mother Jones had the best headline about Trump’s racist screed: “White Man Tells Black Journalists His Black Opponent Is Not Black.” The Washington Post, however, failed the GED journalism test: “Harris faces a pivotal moment as Trump questions her identity.” The WaPo headline bolsters the inherent white supremacy that seemingly entitles white men to define Blackness: Is it “one drop”? Or is it how you speak or where you live or where you went to school? Harris doesn’t have to defend herself or her heritage to clueless buffoons. That’s not her pivotal movement. It’s what MAGA wants.
No, Harris probably long ago learned this valuable lesson from author Toni Morrison:
It’s important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
Women of color understand that they must deal with white men’s garbage, but with our help, Harris will take out that garbage on November 5.
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What a beautiful article. Right now I feel so viscerally angry about this foul, malodorous campaign that I cannot really focus it.
I just want to say to the...let's call them “weak links” that cosign the racist attacks on Kamala Harris for their own misogynistic/colorist ends...especially as they will now dust off the “ADOS” bullshit...
1. Almost all Black Americans (of which Kamala Harris is one) are multiracial. Turn on your brains and think about why that is.
2. Jamaicans, generally like a large number of Black folk in the Western Hemisphere, have British/Anglo last names. Know why?
3. Your anti-Harris bullshit also excludes Malcolm X and Harry Belafonte, for example.
3a. Both Harris' parents marched for our rights in the Civil Rights Movement, even as immigrants. Contrast with the current ladder pullers that support President Klan Robe.
And 4. This line of attack, quantifying Harris' Blackness and doing the birtherism, is in the service of a man who is ALSO a child of two immigrants. Yet he never gets his citizenship questioned. So think about that. You are being played!
I subscribe to WaPo and now I wonder why. After that infuriating headline that DonOLD’s racism creates a pivotal moment for Harris, I sent a statement saying this it isn’t her job to clean up HIS mess. It’s his PIVOTAL moment of certain death of a campaign.
Women have wanted a woman president forever!! Kamala tics all the boxes.
Y’all get outta the way and let the Queen rule.