The audience of black journalists was prepared for a combative exchange well before Donald Trump took the stage on Wednesday for an interview at their annual gathering in Chicago.
Yet when 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 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?” Trump said of Harris, whose mother was Indian-American and whose father is black.
The moment was shocking, but for those who have followed 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.
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The audacity of 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 the US, 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.”
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, DC, 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, California.
“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, Harris responded to 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 Trump’s attacks. “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us — they are an essential source of our strength.”
Attacks on Harris’s racial background have circulated among right-wing figures and Trump’s close allies for years.
In 2019, Donald Trump jnr shared a social media post from an alt-right personality that falsely claimed Harris was not black enough to be discussing the plight of black Americans during a primary debate. Though he 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.
But the Republican nominee’s remarks 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 organiser 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 Trump’s more provocative statements, the comments conveyed several unsettling ideas at once, all of them somewhat open to interpretation: He implied 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 onetime Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday.
“Kamala leaned into her Indian heritage when it was convenient in California,” Ramaswamy wrote on the social platform X. “She’s now casting that aside & leaning into black identity when it’s convenient nationally.”
And by calling attention to her background, Trump seemed to be relying on an old political tactic of exoticising non-white candidates.
Former president Barack Obama — the biracial son of a white mother and black father — faced similar attacks.
For years, Trump and other Republicans spread conspiracy theories about Obama’s racial heritage with innuendo and lies about the authenticity of his birth certificate.
“Was it a birth certificate? You tell me,” said Trump in 2012, years before running to replace 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.”
Obama’s citizenship was never in any doubt, as he had proved by releasing his entire birth certificate a year earlier. But Trump’s accusations were aimed at stoking suspicions and fears among white supporters who were all too eager to believe that Obama was born in Africa.
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Throughout 2011, when he was first considering a foray into presidential politics, he repeated the lie about 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 Trump’s political advisers: his popularity among hard-core Republican voters soared.
On this occasion, Trump seemed to see similar political opportunities in the moment. In the hours after he questioned Harris’s identity, he repeated the claim in a Truth Social post. A headline noting Harris was California’s “first Indian American US 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 levelled against Obama.
Yet, with Harris, such attacks could land differently. Obama ran as a candidate whose success would signal the arrival of a post-racial America. In her first presidential campaign in 2019, Harris announced her candidacy on Martin Luther King Jr Day and ran as an heir to Shirley Chisholm, the first woman to seek the Democratic presidential nomination.
In addition, 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 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 in Atlanta, who specialises in black politics.
“I don’t think that anybody has ever questioned her embrace of her black identity in the same way.”
— This article originally appeared in the New York Times