For the first time since she became the Democratic nominee for president, Kamala Harris addressed head-on the false claims made by Donald Trump about her racial identity, as well as the former president’s history of racial division throughout his public life.
During Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Trump was asked why he felt comfortable during a recent appearance at a conference of Black journalists to falsely claim that the vice president “turned Black” after previously emphasizing her South Asian heritage. Harris, who is the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, rejected the premise that she has to defend her own racial identity.
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But Trump, standing a few feet away from Harris, claimed he no longer cared about the topic.
“I don’t care what she is,” Trump said. “I couldn’t care less. Whatever she wants to be is okay with me.”
He then repeated falsehoods about Harris’ identity, saying, “All I can say is I read where she was not Black… And then I read that she was Black, and that’s okay. Either one was okay with me. That’s up to her.”
In a recent televised interview as the Democratic nominee, a CNN journalist asked Harris to respond to Trump’s remarks about her race. She curtly dismissed his comments as “the same old playbook.”
But on Tuesday, she took time to address it directly.
“Honestly, I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president, who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people,” Harris said.
Harris then fit Trump’s comments into her broader critique of the former president, who her campaign has cast as divisive and backward-looking in a nation exhausted by bombast. While Harris would be a pioneering candidate should she be elected as the nation’s first woman of color president, her campaign has downplayed such framing, instead focusing on themes of freedom and unity.
“I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us, and we don’t want this kind of approach that is just constantly trying to divide us, and especially by race,” she added.
Harris then reminded debate viewers about Trump’s decades-long history of racial division, going back to when the Justice Department investigated him and his father, Fred Trump Sr., for refusing to rent to Black tenants. She then mentioned that he called for the death penalty for the “Central Park Five,” Black and Latino youths who were falsely accused of rape in New York City in the late 1980s, which Trump defended in a brief rebuttal.
“A lot of people, including Mayor (Michael) Bloomberg, agreed with me on the Central Park Five,” Trump said, before falsely saying the youths had pleaded guilty to the sexual assault and brutal beating of a white female jogger in 1989.
The five young men who were wrongly convicted had their convictions vacated in 2002 after evidence linked another person to the crime. In the spin room after the debate, Yussef Salaam, one of the five men exonerated, held up a sign bearing his name as Trump walked through speaking to journalists. Salaam was also elected to the New York City Council last year.
Harris, during the debate, noted how Trump spread the false “birther” theories about President Barack Obama being ineligible to serve as president because he was foreign-born and lacked a U.S.-issued birth certificate.
“I think the American people want better than that, want better than this,” Harris said.
“I meet with people all the time who tell me, can we please just have discourse about how we’re going to invest in the aspirations and the ambitions and the dreams of the American people, knowing that regardless of people’s color or the language their grandmother speaks, we all have the same dreams and aspirations, and want a president who invests in those, not in hate and division,” Harris went on to say.
Civil rights leader Marc Morial of the National Urban League said he found Harris’ debate performance overall to be “masterful.”
“She did a wonderful job both baiting him and sticking him,” he said in a phone interview after Tuesday evening’s debate. “She was prepared, she was disciplined, and she baited him and got him off track.”
On the topic of race, Harris nailed Trump on his rhetoric and troubling record, Morial added.
“By raising the Central Park Five, raising the lawsuits against him, she brought important facts into the equation of his long, long record prior to becoming president,” he said. “His response continued the kind of outright disrespect of Black America that is part and parcel of his career.”