Donald Trump knew exactly what he was doing when he questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ Black identity at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago.
Trump said: “She was Indian all the way, then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went—she became a Black person.”
Now lots of folks are saying this was a disastrous train wreck and that the Trump campaign is now trying to clean up the mess. But actually the Trump campaign has been doubling down on what he told the Black journalists on Wednesday.
At a campaign rally Wednesday night in Harrisburg, Pa., Alina Habba, Trump’s onetime lawyer, said: “I’m going to speak to you, Miss Harris. I’m a strong woman, a mom, a lawyer and an American. And unlike you, Kamala, I know who my roots are, I know where I come from.”.
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And this morning Trump put out a post on his Truth Social platform showing a family photo of a young Kamala Harris with her sari-clad relatives.
Trump wrote: “Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago! Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian heritage are very much appreciated.”
Now Trump’s remarks to the NABJ were definitely racist. But these were not some off-the-cuff remarks. What he said was intentional and reflected a deliberately divisive campaign strategy.
Just consider this. Trump mostly has given interviews to Fox News and other friendly right-wing news outlets. So for Trump to appear at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, where he knew he’d be facing tough questioning, was rather unusual. It was also noteworthy that the three moderators for the panel were all Black women.
What Trump’s appearance succeeded in doing was briefly taking over the news cycle that had been dominated by Harris’ exhilarating campaign launch. But Trump had a more insidious motive because he wanted to provoke discussion about Harris’ identity.
And that brings us to a statement by Trump’s co-campaign manager Susie Wiles in a July 10 story in The Atlantic by Tim Alberta focusing on Trump’s campaign strategy. Here’s a key quote from the story:
Wiles, for her part, wanted to be clear about the campaign’s aims. “It’s so targeted—we’re not fighting for Black people,” she said. “We’re fighting for Black men between 18 and 34.”
That’s why at some campaign rallies Trump appeared with lesser-known rappers. In May, during his hush money/election interference trial, Trump invited two rappers Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow, both of them charged in a sweeping gang case, to join him on stage at a campaign rally in The Bronx.
Alberta’s story also had a clear warning for Democrats: Do not underestimate the co-managers of Trump’s campaign: Wiles and Chris LaCivita. We clearly underestimated the Trump campaign in the run-up to the disastrous July 27 debate. A red flag should have gone up when the Trump camp raised no objections to any condition proposed for the debate by Biden’s campaign team..
Here’s what Alberta wrote about Trump’s campaign managers:
Wiles and LaCivita are two of America’s most feared political operatives. She is the person most responsible for Florida—not long ago the nation’s premier electoral prize—falling off the battleground map, having spearheaded campaigns that so dramatically improved the Republican Party’s performance among nonwhite voters that Democrats are now surrendering the state. He is the strategist and ad maker best known for destroying John Kerry’s presidential hopes in 2004, masterminding the “Swift Boat” attacks that sank the Democratic nominee. Together, as the architects of Trump’s campaign, they represent a threat unlike anything Democrats encountered during the 2016 or 2020 elections.
Alberta’s story was written before President Joe Biden selflessly dropped out of the race and Democrats enthusiastically rallied behind Harris’ candidacy.
LaCivita and Wiles made clear in the story that they very much wanted Biden to remain in the race because of his age. But Harris’ entry threw the Trump campaign for a loop and they’ve had to come up with a new attack line.
And one attack linequite simply boils down to: “Kamala ain’t black.”
If you delve into the cesspool that is X (formerly Twitter) you will find photos of Kamala and her Indian immigrant mother wearing saris as well as videos featuring misogynistic rants by young black men attacking black women for supporting Harris.
Here’s one such exchange that came out after Trump spoke to the Black journalists.
And this X user makes the point that Trump’s remarks at the NABJ were “intentional” and meant to target “a very specific” group of Black men. “
The post called attention to the need to counter such material as a video clip posted by a controversial motivational speaker, Umar Johnson, who considers himself a Pan-Africanist and opposes interracial marriage and homosexuality. Here is what the man who calls himself Dr. Umar (he has a Psy.D. degree from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine) had to say:
”If Black women think that Kamala Harris is going to get into office and take care of them, they got something else coming. You know who she’s going to take care of — her East Indian immigrants. You think East Indian immigrants are already buying up a lot of the franchise restaurants and franchise stores. They are already buying up a lot of the hotel chains in America. … If she can get eight years, by the time Kamala Harris is done being president of the United States of America, the East Indian people will be the priority minority in this country. Not the homosexuals, not Black people, not Latinos.”
Trump has absolutely nothing to offer young Black voters. But his campaign has been using rappers to go after Harris. Of course, if they make enough money they stand to benefit from Trump’s proposed tax cuts.
Billboard reported about the backlash that rapper Swae Lee faced after he posted messages attacking Harris on X
:Another rapper Lil Pump posted this on X which touched again on the lie that Harris isn’t black but Indian.
That post regurgitates another false claim about Harris’ prosecutorial record when she was California’s Attorney General from 2011-2017. Reuters debunked that claim, pointing out that most of the nearly 2,000 marijuana cases during that period were not prosecuted by the AG’s office and that many of these cases did not result in jail time. As vice president, Harris has supported decriminalization of marijuana and criminal justice reform.
Michael Harriot, author of the book “Black AF History: The Un-whitewashed History of America,” in a piece for TheGrio website, exposed what’s behind the whole “Kamala ain’t Black” conspiracy theory. Sadly he concluded that African-Americans are catching up with their white counterparts when it comes to manufacturing conspiracy theories, saying Elon Musk has in a sense brought DEI to Black Twitter.
Harriot wrote:
Ever since the renowned corporate colonizer turned his social media company into an online university for courses on white genocide, Jewish space lasers and the woke-mind virus, Black Twitter has been slowly closing the racial conspiracy theory gap.
Perhaps the biggest example of inclusion is the small sliver of Black people who have come up with a version of birtherism that is as racist, ridiculous and patently untrue as the search for Barack Obama’s birth certificate:
Apparently, Kamala Harris is not Black. I’m not laughing; that’s my asthma acting up! While it is easy to dismiss this claim by using the age-old method of genetic testing called “eyesight,” theGrio decided to investigate this hilarious hypothesis seriously. …
Anyone with Black skin whose feet have touched American soil has more in common with a Keisha from Atlanta than a Karen from Wisconsin. Even if one considers Kamala to be a first-generation Jamaican-South Asian descendant of Irish slaveowners, the people whose entire political party is predicated on the supremacy of whiteness have the same regard for Harris’ heritage as they do for my ancestors, who were enslaved in South Carolina by Irish immigrants who owned plantations in the Caribbean.
Harriot noted that the majority of Black voters had no problem casting their ballots for FDR, JFK, LBJ or other Democratic presidential nominees all but one of whom were white and “whose ancestry was never questioned.” So why should Kamala Harris be treated any differently.
Harriot concluded:
”Maybe you think it’s perfectly fine to base your politics on a construct that didn’t exist until white people made it up; just acknowledge that you would rather let white people choose the president. Of course, enabling white people to maintain power over people of other races is the literal definition of white supremacy.”
What Trump did by questioning Harris’ Black identity was an intentional but desperate ploy as the campaign has swung against him.
But we can’t underestimate his campaign and must be aware of its strategy in order to counter it decisively..
