Vance and other Trump allies amplify a false claim about Harris’ racial identity

Senator JD Vance of Ohio, Donald Trump’s running mate, defended a false claim the former president made about vice president Kamala Harris ‘racial identity, which falsely suggested that Harris had downplayed her black heritage in an attempt to suggest she was inauthentic.

“I saw it as an attack on Kamala Harris, who is supposedly a chameleon,” he told reporters in Michigan when asked about the former president’s suggestion that Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, had only recently begun identifying as black.

“I think he observed the fundamental reality that Kamala Harris pretends to be something different depending on the audience she’s speaking to,” Vance said. “She pretends to be who she is depending on the audience she’s speaking to, and that’s who she is and that’s who she’s always been.”

Vance’s was the most recent of the Republican criticism of how Harris is portraying herself, in the wake of Trump’s comments last week at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago. Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, a prominent Trump surrogate who is Black, repeated the assertion Sunday as a guest on ABC’s “This Week.”

According to Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, other Republicans’ spreading of Trump’s lies is part of their effort to stay in his favor.

“It’s, ‘I’ll do anything, and I don’t want to be on the wrong side of you,'” said Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor who was the first Black man to lead the RNC. “It’s, ‘I don’t want to take the heat that comes with calling out your racism, that comes with calling out your ugliness, so I’m going to pretend that’s not what it is.'”

Harris’ campaign has declined to comment specifically on Trump’s false claim. The vice president, last week i spoke to a black student associationaccused Trump of “the same old show: division and disrespect.”

Harris has often spoken about her Black heritage alongside her Indian-American heritage throughout her political career. She was the first African-American to serve as Attorney General of California and became the first Indian-American to serve as a U.S. Senator and the second Black woman, after Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois.

As an undergraduate, Harris attended Howard University, one of the nation’s leading historically black colleges and universities. There, she also became a member of the historically black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha.

As San Francisco’s first black district attorney, she was recognized as a “Woman of Power” by the National Urban League and received the National Black Prosecutors Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award in 2005.

She was recognized in India Abroad during her 2010 campaign for California Attorney General as potentially “the first African American and the first Indian American” to hold the office.

Harris identified himself as both black and Native American in an Associated Press article that same year, which was about the number of Native American candidates running for major office that year.

“I grew up in a family where I had a strong sense of my culture and who I am, and I never felt insecure about that,” she said at the time. “Slowly, maybe, with each of us taking on more prominent positions, people will begin to understand the diversity of people.”

Harris joined the Congressional Black Caucus when she entered the Senate in 2017. And in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” Harris wrote of her time at Howard: “Every sign told students that we could be anything — that we were young, talented, and Black, and that we should let nothing stand in the way of our success. Campus was a place where you didn’t have to be limited to someone else’s choice.”

The echo of Trump’s claim comes as the Republican nominee has sought to limit Harris’ fundraising and media attention after she took over President Joe Biden’s campaign following the president dropped out of the race. Some Republican strategists have criticized Trump because he made the personal attacks he previously made against President Barack Obama’s citizenship, instead of focusing on issues like the economy or immigration.

Vance previously criticized Harris for using a “fake Southern accent” while campaigning in Atlanta last week. And Michaelah Montgomery, a black conservative activist who organized a high-profile Trump meet-and-greet with local college students at a Chick-fil-A in Atlanta, lashed out at Harris at the former president’s rally on Saturday, suggesting of Harris, “She’s only black when it’s time to run for office.”

Rashawn Ray, a national scholar on racial and social inequality and vice president of the American Institutes for Research, said the criticism deliberately ignores the growing number of people who identify as multiracial.

“People can be both black and Asian,” Ray said.

By casting doubt on Harris’ identification as black, they are attempting to use her race to undermine her qualifications for the presidency, just as Trump did when he questioned Obama’s citizenship, Ray said.

“Some people believe that by attacking the authenticity of Vice President Harris’ blackness, they can blow a dog whistle that calls into question her Americanness and electability,” Ray said. “People are often judged by how they look rather than what they represent. Some people bank on the shallowness of this perspective.”

___

Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.