Black Voters Respond to Controversy Regarding VP Harris’s “Race”
Unsurprisingly, the Trump campaign has attempted to ethnically label her.
By Cash Michaels –
The made-up “controversy” is whether Harris primarily self-identifies as Black or Indian-American.
Her Republican opponent for the presidency, former Pres. Donald Trump, insists that she “only recently’ declared herself to be Black, which of course is not true. But even a few Black conservatives, like the controversial Candace Owens, joined in the rhetorical fray.
Race-Baiting by Black Conservatives?
“That’s objectively funny, and it’s the same question that we’re all asking ourselves, which is like, who is this girl mimicking?” Owens sarcastically said on her YouTube channel. “Now she’s like Kamala from the block—nobody recognizes this Kamala.”
“Black” rapper/model Amber Rose, who is of mixed race heritage herself, and who stirred her own controversy speaking as a Trump supporter at the recent Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, told the Adin Ross livestream program that she felt VP Harris was “pandering to Black people.”
“I think that [Harris] thinks that that’s what Black people wanna see in order to vote for her,” Rose said.
While some elected Republicans, like House Speaker Mike Johnson and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) have said VP Harris should be scrutinized for her record, not her race, some elected Republicans, like Trump running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), have dismissively called her a “DEI hire.”
False Assertions Abound
Others, like Black Republican Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, insist that Harris identifies as “Indian-American” first. “If we’re going to be accurate, when Kamala Harris went into the United States Senate, it was [the Associated Press] that said she was the first Indian American United States senator,” Donalds told ABC’s This Week talk show. “It was actually played up a lot when she came into the Senate. Now she’s running nationally, obviously, the campaign has shifted. They’re talking much more about her father’s heritage and her Black identity.”
Donalds, however, deliberately distorted the opening sentence from that Associated Press article, which reads: “Harris will enter the chamber as the first Indian woman elected to a Senate seat and the second Black woman, following Carol Moseley Braun, who served a single term after being elected in 1992.” [emphasis added]
Calling it What it is
The Harris campaign has blasted Trump and his surrogates for their attempts to cause racial confusion.
“The hostility Donald Trump showed …is the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people,” a campaign spokesperson said.
Here in North Carolina, which the Harris-Walz campaign hopes to put in play in November, African American Harris supporters are also outraged.
Black NC Leaders Outraged
NCCU Law Prof. Irving Joyner, speaking for many Black Democratic supporters, asked rhetorically, “How in the hell can a few uninformed and ill-focused Blacks allow a race-challenged and insensitive Donald Trump to distract them into debating whether Kamala Harris is Black? By every indicator, she is definitely Black and one of us… It is true that she is mixed-race, but many African Americans fit that category,” he continued.
Joyner added, “Legally, in most states, a person is deemed to be Black if there is a mere one drop of Black blood within their body. Kamala is at least 50%, as was Barack Obama … and literally millions of other Black people in this country and around the world.”
Similarly, Kinston City Councilman Chris Suggs, at 24 the youngest elected official in North Carolina and a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, told NC Black Voters for Harris, “Vice President Harris is the real deal, y’all…. She’s not working to build walls and divisions like those other folks. From what we witnessed, she has united our party like never before.”
And NC native Reverend Dr. Benjamin Chavis told NC Black Voters for Harris online last week, “We have so much to vote for, not just to vote against, but to vote for. I particularly want our young people, our millennials and generation Z, to get inspired and not be dissuaded by all the falsehoods and distractions and misinformation on social media.”
Identity or Electability?
According to a recent report in The NY Times, “A poll of likely Black voters in seven battleground states (including North Carolina), conducted in mid-July by the left-leaning group Data for Progress, found that a minority agreed with the notion that Democrats cannot pass over the first Black female vice president. A majority preferred the more pragmatic option: picking the person with the best chance to beat Mr. Trump.”
“While Kamala Harris is a very popular pick, justifying her selection through an appeal to identity would probably be unnecessary, unconvincing, and counterproductive with Black voters,” said an analysis of the poll by Split Ticket, an election modeling and data analysis group,” the Times report added.
Issue Raised by Trump at NABJ
The controversy arose from last week’s raucous appearance by Donald Trump at the Chicago convention of the National Association of Black Journalists. During live-streamed roundtable questioning by three Black female reporters, Trump said of Harris, “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?”
ABC News Senior Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott instantly fact-checked Trump’s answer on-stage, reminding him that Harris, born in Oakland, California, is the daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, but has always identified as being a Black woman and graduated from an HBCU (Howard University). Trump replied, “I respect either one. But she obviously doesn’t because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went—she became a Black person.”
[Editor’s Note: In 2020, Politico led its story of Harris’s joining the Biden ticket with this header: “Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, was the wire-to-wire frontrunner for Biden’s No. 2 job.” And as early as 2016, her election to the US Senate was hailed by The Los Angeles Times thus: “… Harris will become only the second black woman in the nation’s history to serve in Congress’ upper chamber.”]
Backlash Blasts Trump
Black leaders across the national spectrum, like NAACP Pres./CEO Derrick Johnson, have blasted Trump for his remarks and his attempt to negatively inject racial identity into a close presidential race.
“To walk into a room full of Black journalists and attack someone’s ‘Blackness’ is another level of disrespect,” Johnson wrote. “To anyone who needs a reminder: we can’t change the color of our skin, and we don’t want to.”
