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I meannnnn trump has a $83mm defamation judgement against him and he’s currently claiming that Harris isn’t actually black.
Politics is dirty and Trump loves it in the mud.
It does help that harris is only half black and there is enough media around to point to where her "indian heritage" is used in a creepy DEI sort of way.
1/4 black actually.
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I think there is a legit question of whether she is black. She is just as much black as she is white. If someone described Kamala as white, I think people would say you are crazy.
What does it mean to be black? Is it ethnicity and if so how much? Is it experience? Is it “she looks black”
For the sake of the dominant American culture, "black" means whatever they want it to mean as long as they get to call people that don't agree racist. It's how you get affirmative action policies that benefit literal foreign political royalty in the US.
America is race-obsessed, likely because their founding document and national spirit cannot come to grips with the fact that unequal outcomes exist. They have spent ages wrestling with the question of why success and wealth is not equally distributed among individuals in a land of supposed equal opportunity. This is why they're so desperate for a black female president. Not because it'd make a better president, but because it'd be evidence that the universalism they believe in isn't broken.
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The point is that while Kamala really SHOULD be vulnerable on that front, it's Just Not Done to question the blackness of a claimed-black politician, particularly if you're not black yourself.
Trump, characteristically, does not care what is Just Not Done. I doubt the pearl-clutching about it is going to hurt him, even if questioning her blackness isn't a winner either; by now that Trump does not obey (often progressive-defined) social conventions is pretty well baked in.
Harris has a greater claim to being black than Obama, since Obama grew up with his white mom and grandparents. That Harris is not acculturated to Black struggles because her Jamaican father was an academic who mixed with polite company instead of living the black experience is only mildly inconvenient for Harris.
Harris does not LOOK black. Her hair is flowing, she is so pale she doesn't even count as high yellow, and she talks like AOC instead of Cori Bush. Harris has little claim to the black experience even in California, and to her credit she is not running on her blackness the same way Obama did (maybe because Obama is a deft operator whose political presentation is unmatched since Bill Clinton).
Besides and lets be real here, is running on blackness a win condition? Harris is aware that the balancing game of democratic turnout and normie turnoff does not favor evoking MLK tier struggles, much less the poisoned Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan style polemics that Blacks actually paid attention to. Ibrahm Kendi has thankfully been relegated to the dirt where he belongs, so the dems at least do not need to listen to him as much as they had to during 2018-2021.
She grew up in Berkeley and Canada.
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Didn't her parents split up when she was young and she grew up with her indian mother?
Shit, really? I keep seeing paeans to Donald Harris plastered across Reddit, especially that black and white photo of him carrying Kamala as a baby. Guess I fell victim to the narrative shaping.
In which case then Kamala has the same case to black identity as Obama. Mother raising a child in the mothers culture with no input from the sperm donor. Any 'blackness' these miscegenated monocultures pretend at is a construction formed in university for social purposes.
Obama at least sported a fro and played basketball. Does Harris make a single pretense at black presentation?
this is from a bit over a year ago, kind of a weird thing where she went and bought some records. to me this comes across badly because why are you buying these basic albums only now?
https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/vice-president-kamala-harris-vinyl-records-haul-1235325660/
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She went to high school at Westmount in Montreal -- I guess she might count as relatively 'black' (maybe even 'poor'!) in that crowd, but 'rootless intellectual' is probably a better description.
I think she's somewhat estranged with her dad actually? He issued her a public spanking for leaning into the stereotype of Jamaicans being heavy pot smokers, anyways.
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Oh, the one where he "slandered" a woman by claiming that he didn't rape her? Yeah, I'm going to have to discount that one to zero.
As @Mottizen said, it's not actually what he said.
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If you actually watch the interview Trump's claim was 'Harris chooses whether to emphasize her Indian heritage or African heritage depending on however the IdPol winds are blowing' not that she's literally not Black.
“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?”
That’s the quote, questioning if a mixed race person is black. OP claiming Trump Is somehow above the mud of dirty politics is laughable.
Less we forget Trump was a huge pusher of the birth certificate claim against Obama. He’s been this way all along.
I think there's a difference of presenting something untrue as fact and questioning someone's willingness to rebrand themselves the instant the winds change. If you interpret "Is she black" as a racial statement rather one of cultural alignment than that's your movie screen. "Is she black" is a relevant question to Black America - is she truly someone who aligns herself to the plights of impoverished Black Americans, or is she conveniently emphasizing her Blackness as a way to procure votes? It's mudslinging, sure, but also has an element of truth asking people to analyze her character beyond simple racial solidarity.
It is the Democrats who dragged Trump through the mud with legitimately false claims such as the Steele Dossier. I find Trump's 'lies', 'hyperbole', or 'political mudslinging' positively refreshing compared to the gaslighting Democrats have shown themselves willing to do on an international level for the past 8 years.
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If you're going to imbue 'Black Identity' with cultural cachet, a shared experience, and promote it above others, it is absolutely correct to question whether celebrity politicians honestly reflect it or are grifting.
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Is English your first language?
That very clearly reads as him attacking her for choosing what group to identify with based on convenience.
Don't do that, please. Even if you think someone is being obtuse.
Is there a way to ask this legitimately though?
I’m actually just curious if the undertone isn’t coming through in translation. It seems totally reasonable that a non native English speaker would interpret what Trump is saying here literally and not understand the implied meaning.
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I’d consider attacking a mixed race person based on their identity well beyond the pale. However this is a forum that vigorously defended a child rapist last week so unsurprised the reaction to Trump’s racism. Lot of weird people here.
He is attacking her for being a phony (Indian when it helps, black when it helps).
She is 1/4 black. Is that really black? She is more non black than black. One drop rule?
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He’s claiming she’s not really African American and as far as I can tell that’s just literally true- she’s not.
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Who?
I presume he's referring to Stephen van de Welde.
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Link to discussion
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For a moment, I thought describing his comment like this was weird, but then it occurred to me that using particular blunt and non-descriptive categories to describe a specific event in a way that attaches negative affect is a common enough occurrence that one of Scott Alexander's more famous essays on SlateStarCodex back in the day, titled The Worst Argument in the World IIRC, was based around it. Of course, this is my subjective take, but Trump's line, on its merits, seems far more similar to his attacks on another mixed race person based on their identity, Elizabeth Warren, whom he called "Pocahontas," presumably as a way to insultingly accuse her of opportunistically abusing her claimed heritage for career advancement. Except without the schoolyard name-calling, but rather making a pretty meaningful - though unfalsifiably vague - claim, that Harris is selectively emphasizing aspects of her racial identity opportunistically to garner points depending on the context.
Honestly, pointing out Harris's or Warren's alleged cynical racial maneuvering seems rather trite considering that's pretty much expected of someone ambitious and arrogant enough to try to be the next POTUS, and Trump of all people should probably know that, but I've never clocked him as the self aware type. Still, politicians at least like to roleplay being respectable, and they do it well enough to convince a lot of people, and certainly on its merits, the kind of behavior being alleged is not respectable, so I don't find the accusation beyond the pale. Rather well within the pale, in fact, to the extent that it's actually pretty damning to US journalism that in a country whose political discourse explicitly talks so much about how race should inform how we treat individuals and enforcing that with policy, the industry doesn't spend more time questioning politicians on how they might have cynically maneuvered the racialist landscape to consolidate their power. I don't know who'd be the ones to damn, though, because the journalists are ultimately serving an audience that just doesn't care about that.
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He's not attacking her identity wantonly, he's attacking the way she uses it.
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Speak about individuals, don't make (inaccurate) generalizations like this. If you want to accuse the person you're talking to of defending child rapists, fine, accuse him of saying that (and be prepared to defend it), but "this forum" did not "vigorously defend a child rapist." This is the sort of straw man that gets people bounced, and then they whine that we're banning people for going against "forum culture."
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