August 2, 2024
When former President Donald Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity on Wednesday, July 31, he lifted a longstanding and false line of attack from the fringes of political discourse to the very center of a presidential campaign, reports The New York Times.
For years, rivals and critics have lodged accusations that Harris shifts her personal identity to her political advantage, and that she is, in fact, not who she claims to be. Those attacks, based on falsehoods, misinformation, and conspiratorial notions, have increased dramatically in the week and a half since she emerged as the Democrats’ all-but-certain standard-bearer.
The next day, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who spoke at the Republican National Convention last month, said on his popular interview show that the vice president was “sort of Black, sort of Indian.”
The rapper Lil Pump—a Trump supporter who has some 20 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and X—said on Sunday, July 28, that “Kamala Harris isn’t even black…she’s Indian.”
Their comments, seemingly aimed at suggesting to Black voters that the Democratic candidate does not represent them and, more broadly, planting the idea that Harris is inauthentic, helped turn what had been a trickle of such content into a gusher.
Overnight, conservative corners of the Internet—long fixated on Biden’s age—swung to what looked to be their newest target. Years-old video clips of Harris acknowledging her South Asian heritage found fresh currency, along with memes mocking her speaking style and even a Billy Joel song modified to say that “she’s not Black or White, Indian, Jamaican.”
“This is something she’s dealt with her entire career,” said Neil Makhija, the president of the advocacy group Indian American Impact. He pointed out that Harris attended Howard University, a historically Black university, and belongs to a prominent Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. “Trump questioning her identity and heritage is nothing new, and it’s part of a long-running strategy of employing racial division and animus.”
On Wednesday, Trump embraced the discourse wholeheartedly while sitting for a question-and-answer session at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago.
He later followed that statement, which drew gasps from the room, with a post on his social network, Truth Social, that Harris was “stating she’s Indian, not Black” and that she was a “stone cold phony.”
Research contact: @nytimes
