As Kamala Harris gains ground Trump attacks her racial identity

As Vice President Kamala Harris notched significant gains in battleground states, her Republican rival Donald Trump attacked her biracial identity, falsely suggesting that she always promoted her Indian heritage before turning black in recent years.

The former President made inflammatory remarks about Harris, daughter of two immigrants, an Indian mother and a Jamaican father at the National Association of Black Journalists convention Wednesday

When asked if he agreed with comments from some Republicans who claim Harris has political power because of “diversity, equity and inclusion,” Trump falsely suggested Harris has changed how she discussed her racial identity, NPR reported.

“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said. “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?”

READ: Kamala Harris can prevent Trump from dragging US towards authoritarianism: Salman Rushdie (July 29, 2024)

Harris is a member of a historically Black sorority, attended Howard University, one of the most prominent historically Black colleges in the country, and was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus when she was a US senator from California.

Harris briefly responded to Trump’s remarks as she gave a Wednesday night speech to a conference of Sigma Gamma Rho, a historically Black sorority, in Houston.

“It was the same old show — the divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better,” Harris was quoted as saying. She said Trump’s comments to the NABJ were “yet another reminder” of what his presidency was like.

Trump “suggested to the predominantly Black audience that she was not one of them — and to Indian Americans listening that she abandoned them,” commented the New York Times.

His assertion was echoed by onetime Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday.

“Kamala leaned into her Indian heritage when it was convenient in California,” Indian American biotech billionaire wrote on the social platform X. “She’s now casting that aside & leaning into black identity.”

“The audacity of Trump, a white man, questioning how much a Black woman truly belongs to Black America was particularly incendiary,” wrote the Times.

“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.”

The Republican nominee’s remarks Wednesday “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,” the Times wrote.

Harris neck-and-neck with Trump after campaign launch: poll (July 24, 2024)

“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,” Cliff Albright, a liberal organizer and a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, was quoted as saying. “They’ll eat it up. He gets more out of this than we get out of it.”

In the hours after he questioned Harris’ identity, he repeated the claim in a Truth Social post, according to the Times.

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 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 leveled against Obama, the Times noted.

Trump’s attacks came as several polls, including one released by The Economist/You Gov on Wednesday, showed that the vice president has narrowed or erased the lead that Trump held in the days leading up to Biden dropping out.

When presented with a hypothetical matchup between Harris and Trump, 46% of the 1,610 adults surveyed by The Economist/You Gov survey said they backed the vice president, while 44% favored Trump. The lead is within the poll’s margin of error of 3.3%. The results were collected from July 27 to July 30.

Harris also received a boost in several critical swing states this week. According to a Bloomberg News/Morning Consultant poll released Tuesday, the vice president had gained on Trump across seven battleground states, holding a 1-point lead over the former president.

At the beginning of the month, the pollster’s survey showed Biden trailing Trump by 2 percentage points across the states surveyed, which include Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

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