Politics
Trump’s Comments on Kamala Harris’ Race Sounded Like Gibberish. But They Tapped Into a Real Division He’d Like to Exploit.
We’ve seen this before.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
At the National Association of Black Journalists convention on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump stoked widespread ire when he questioned the racial makeup of his presumed 2024 presidential campaign opponent, Vice President Kamala 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,” he said on the stage next to three Black reporters. “Is she Indian or is she Black?”
H. Samy Alim, a sociolinguist who studies Black cultural identity, identified the attack as a campaign strategy. Trump’s going to “try to de-authenticate her as Black,” Alim said, “trying to paint her as someone using Blackness to gain political favor.”
And indeed, by the end of the day, Trump proxies were attempting to build on this initial attempt to paint Harris as “a liar” and a “phony.”
But whether Trump realized it or not, he touched on a topic that has circulated in fringe online communities for years—and not just in right-wing forums. Another growing community, the American Descendants of Slavery, started calling Harris’ racial bona fides into question during the 2020 Democratic primary. Members of the group dispute the idea that Harris’ Jamaican ancestry aligns her with the Black American community, and question whether she qualifies as Black at all.
To understand where these arguments come from, one has to understand that her critics are referring to “Blackness” as a political identity, not just as a race or ethnicity. As Jennifer Sims, a sociologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who studies mixed-race identity, explained to Slate, the criticisms from some Black people often have to do with whose ancestors took part in the fight for racial justice in the United States.
Things like: “Those of us whose families are African Americans, [particularly] in the South, we were the ones that were marching through the state, boycotting the buses, had the dogs set on us,” she said, referring to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and ’60s. But Black Americans frequently see multiracial or Black people whose parents were not born in the U.S. occupy the most visible—and powerful—roles in politics. Like Harris, former President Barack Obama was also a multiracial child of immigrants.
But it’s important to note that critiques from ADOS and the like differ from those of right-wing actors like Trump. The latter seized on Obama’s parentage to cast him as illegitimate—and now they’re doing the same to Harris. There are already tweets circulating about Harris’ birth certificate, a clear callback to the bad-faith attacks on Obama’s first campaign that were also pioneered by Trump. (“Some people say that was not his birth certificate.