Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, drew gasps on Wednesday when he said at the National Association of Black Journalists convention that Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, had suddenly adopted a Black identity.
Harris’ father is from Jamaica, her late mother from India. Trump claimed: “I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. 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?”
When one of the journalists who was interviewing Trump on stage tried to tell him that Harris had always identified as Black and had attended a historically Black university, Trump continued: “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. And I think somebody should look into that too.”
Trump’s comments prompted immediate bipartisan criticism. Leaving aside the issue of the appropriateness of the remarks, his claims are just not true.
Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. Harris did not “all of a sudden” begin identifying as Black. She has embraced and discussed her Black identity for decades, beginning long before she became a political candidate, while also honoring her South Asian heritage.
Harris graduated in 1986 from Howard University, a historically Black institution where she was a member of a historically Black sorority. After that, she was elected president of the association of Black law students in her second year at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, according to her 2019 memoir.
Politico reported in 2021 that, as a third-year student at the law school in 1989, Harris rose to speak against anti-Black racism at a campus demonstration prompted by the discovery of racist vandalism: “For Black students, she said, according to archives of the Hastings Law News, the cartoon was an example of ‘what we deal with all the time.’”
A profile of Harris in the publication AsianWeek in 2003, when she was running for San Francisco district attorney, was focused on her South Asian heritage. But it quoted Harris discussing her father as “a Black man” and saying, “I grew up with a strong Indian culture, and I was raised in a Black community. All my friends were Black, and we got together and cooked Indian food and painted henna on our hands, and I never felt uncomfortable with my cultural background.”
Read more about why Trump’s claim about Harris’ was false and several other false statements he made at the conference here.
