Hours after Donald Trump questioned whether she was truly a Black woman, Vice President Kamala Harris slammed the former president’s racist remark as she spoke before a cheering crowd of members of a predominantly Black sorority in Houston, Texas.
Harris told sisters of the Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority — a member of the “Divine Nine” group of historically Black fraternities and sororities — that Trump’s remarks before the National Association of Black Journalists, in which he claimed that she had “all of a sudden she made a turn and … became a Black person,” were “the same old show” of “divisiveness and disrespect” from the ex-president.
Trump’s comments came during a bizarre 30-minute sit-down at the journalism organization’s annual conference in Chicago moments after he told ABC’s Rachel Scott that he “didn’t know” that Harris “was Black.”
“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?”
The vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee for president is the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, making her both the first African-American and Asian-American person to hold the second highest office in the US government.
The former president’s remarks have been widely condemned as racist by members of both parties, and in a statement, Harris’ campaign communications director said Trump “showed … the same hostility he has shown throughout his life, throughout his term in office, and throughout his campaign for president as he seeks to regain power and inflict his harmful Project 2025 agenda on the American people.”
In response, Harris simply told her audience: “The American people deserve better.”
“And the American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strength,” she said.
The vice president added that her campaign for the presidency is “a fight for the future” and a “fight for freedom across our nation” against “ a full-on attack on hard-fought, hard-won, fundamental freedoms and rights” from Trump and his allies.