Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, on Wednesday defended a false claim the former president made about Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity, wrongly suggesting Harris downplayed her black heritage in an attempt to suggest she wasn’t authentic.
“I took that as an attack on Kamala Harris, who is a chameleon,” he told reporters in Michigan when asked about the former president’s suggestion that Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, had only recently identified as black.
“I think he saw the fundamental reality that Kamala Harris pretends to be someone different depending on the audience she’s speaking to,” Vance said. “She pretends to be who she is depending on the audience she’s speaking to, and that’s who she is and that’s who she’s always been.”
Vance’s comments are the latest from Republicans who have criticized Harris’s portrayal, following Trump’s remarks last week at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago. Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, a senior Trump spokesman who is black, echoed those remarks Sunday as a guest on ABC’s “This Week.”
The proliferation of Trump’s lies by other Republicans is part of their efforts to stay in his favor, said former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.
“It’s, ‘I’ll do anything and I don’t want to get on your bad side,’” said Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor who was the first black man to lead the RNC. “It’s, ‘I don’t want to take the criticism that comes with calling out your racism, that comes with calling out your ugliness, so I’m going to pretend that I don’t.’”
Harris’ campaign declined to comment specifically on Trump’s false statements. The vice president, speaking to a black sorority last week, accused Trump of “doing the same thing over and over again: division and disrespect.”
Throughout her political career, Harris has often spoken of her black identity in addition to her Indian American background. She was the first African American to serve as California’s attorney general and became the first Indian American to serve as a U.S. senator and the second black woman, after Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois.
As an undergraduate, Harris attended Howard University, one of the nation’s largest historically black colleges and universities, where she also joined the historically black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha.
As San Francisco’s first black female prosecutor, she was recognized as a “Power Woman” by the National Urban League and received the Thurgood Marshall Award from the National Black Prosecutors Association in 2005.
She was recognized in India abroad during her 2010 campaign for California attorney general as potentially “the first African-American as well as the first Indian-American” to hold the office.
Harris identified himself as both black and Indian in an Associated Press article published that same year about the number of candidates of Indian descent running for major office that year.
“I grew up in a family where I had a strong sense of my culture and who I was, and I never felt insecure about it,” she said at the time. “Slowly, perhaps, as each of us gets into more senior positions, people will start to understand the diversity of people.”
Harris joined the Congressional Black Caucus when she entered the Senate in 2017. And writing about her time at Howard in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” Harris wrote, “Every signal told students that we could be anything we wanted to be—that we were young, talented, and Black, and that we should not let anything get in the way of our success. Campus was a place where you didn’t have to be confined to someone else’s box.”
Trump’s remarks echo those of Harris, who has sought to scale back her fundraising and media attention after taking over as the campaign leader for President Joe Biden after he dropped out of the race. Some Republican strategists have criticized Trump for launching personal attacks that echo his previous challenges to President Barack Obama’s citizenship, instead of focusing on issues like the economy or immigration.
Vance had previously criticized Harris for using what he called a “fake Southern accent” while campaigning in Atlanta last week. And Michaelah Montgomery, a black conservative activist who organized a meet-and-greet with Trump for local college students at an Atlanta Chick-fil-A, lashed out at Harris at the former president’s rally Saturday, suggesting of Harris, “She’s only black when it’s time to be elected.”
Rashawn Ray, a national researcher on racial and social inequality and vice president of the American Institutes for Research, said critics are willfully ignoring the growing number of people who identify as multiracial.
“People can be both black and Asian,” Ray said.
Questioning Harris’ black identity is also an attempt to use race to undermine her qualifications to be president — as Trump did by questioning Obama’s citizenship — Ray said.
“Some believe that by attacking the authenticity of Vice President Harris’s blackness, they can create a call for change that will challenge her Americanness and electability,” Ray said. “People are often judged by what they look like rather than what they represent. Some are banking on the superficiality of that perspective.”
Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.
Originally published:
