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“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?” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, whose mother was Indian American and whose father is Black.

The moment was shocking, but for those who have followed Mr. Trump’s divisive language,
it was hardly surprising.

♦️The former president has a history of using race to pit groups of Americans against one another, amplifying a strain of racial politics that has risen as a generation of Black politicians has ascended♦️

The audacity of Mr. Trump, a white man, questioning how much a Black woman truly belongs to Black America was particularly incendiary.

And it evoked 🔷an ugly history in this country, in which white America has often declared the racial categories that define citizens, and sought to determine who gets to call themselves what.🔷

“Give me a break,” said Fred Sweets, a contributing editor at The St. Louis American who watched the discussion from the third row.
“He seemed to be denigrating her background. She knows who she is.”

Ms. Harris has embraced her dual racial identities.

She has long identified as Black and was shaped by several Black institutions. She graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C., and there joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black sorority.

She has spoken extensively about growing up in what she described as a Black community in Berkeley, Calif.

"She had two Black babies, and she raised them to be two Black women,” Harris told The New York Times in a 2016 interview about her mother.

On Wednesday evening, Ms. Harris responded to Mr. Trump’s comment at an event hosted by one of the nation’s most prominent Black sororities, saying they showed “#divisiveness and #disrespect.”

“The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth,” she said, making no direct reference to Mr. Trump’s personal attacks.

“We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us
— they are an essential source of our strength.”

Attacks on Ms. Harris’s racial background have circulated among right-wing figures and Mr. Trump’s close allies for years.

In 2019, Donald Trump Jr. shared a social media post from an alt-right personality that falsely claimed Ms. Harris was
🔥not Black enough 🔥to be discussing the plight of Black Americans during a primary debate.

Though Mr. Trump later deleted the post, it spread widely across conservative social media, prompting a wave of accounts to question her background,
👉which was exactly the point of the effort, according to some far-right activists.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/us/politics/trump-harris-race.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare