For the first time since she became the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris directly addressed Donald Trump’s false claims about her racial identity, and the former president’s history of racial division in his public life.
During Tuesday evening presidential debateTrump was asked why he felt comfortable falsely claiming during a recent appearance at a conference of black journalists that the vice president “turned black” after previously emphasizing her South Asian heritage. Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, rejected the premise that she should defend her own racial identity.
But Trump, standing a few feet away from Harris, claimed the topic no longer interested him.
“I don’t care what she is,” Trump said. “I don’t give a damn. Whatever she wants to be, I’m fine with it.”
He then repeated lies about Harris’ identity, saying, “All I can say is I read she wasn’t black… And then I read she was black, and that’s OK. Both of them were OK with me. That’s on her.”
In a recent television interview as the Democratic candidate, a CNN reporter asked Harris to respond to Trump’s comments about her race. She curtly dismissed his remarks as “the same old playbook.”
But on Tuesday she took the time to address it directly.
“I think it’s a tragedy, frankly, that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently tried throughout his career to use race to divide the American people,” Harris said.
Harris subsequently fitted Trump’s comments into her broader criticism of the former president, whom her campaign has portrayed as divided and backward in a country exhausted by bombast. While Harris would be a groundbreaking candidate if elected as the country’s first woman of color, her campaign has downplayed such framing, focusing instead on themes of freedom and unity.
“I believe the vast majority of us know that we have much more in common than what divides us, and we don’t want this approach that continually tries to divide us, particularly on the basis of race,” she added.
Harris then reminded the debates of Trump’s decades-long history of racial division, dating back to when the Justice Department investigated him and his father, Fred Trump Sr., for refusing to rent to black tenants. She then cited his calls for the death penalty for the “Central Park Five,” black and Hispanic youths wrongly accused of rape in New York City in the late 1980s, which Trump defended in a brief.
“A lot of people, including Mayor (Michael) Bloomberg, agreed with me about the Central Park Five,” Trump said, before falsely claiming the youths had pleaded guilty to the sexual assault and brutal beating of a white female jogger in 1989.
The five young men who were wrongfully convicted had their convictions overturned in 2002 after evidence linked another person to the crime. In the spin room after the debate, Yussef Salaam, one of the five acquitted, held up a sign with his name on it as Trump walked through and spoke to reporters. Salaam was also elected to the New York City Council last year.
Harris noted during the debate how Trump spread the false “birther” theories that President Barack Obama was ineligible to serve as president because he was born abroad and did not have a U.S. birth certificate.
“I think the American people want better than that, want better than this,” Harris said.
“I run into people all the time who say to me, can we please have a conversation about how we are going to invest in the aspirations and ambitions and dreams of the American people, knowing that no matter what color people are or what language their grandmother speaks, we all have the same dreams and aspirations, and we want a president who invests in that, not in hate and division,” Harris continued.
Marc Morial, head of the National Urban League for Civil Rights, said he found Harris’ debate performance overall “masterful.”
“She did a great job of both baiting him and stinging him,” he said in a telephone interview after Tuesday night’s debate. “She was prepared, she was disciplined, and she baited him and she threw him off the path.”
On the topic of race, Harris said he took Trump to task for his rhetoric and troubling record, Morial added.
“By creating the Central Park Five, by bringing the lawsuits against him, she brought important facts into the equation of his long, long record of service before he became president,” he said. “His response perpetuated the kind of unmitigated contempt for Black America that has been inextricably linked to his career.”