‘A Major Flaw, Not Just in the Campaign, But in Him’: Attacks on Harris’s Ethnicity Exposed
White Americans should not control definitions of racial identity
Donald Trump’s ongoing and repeated attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity expose the ugliness not only of Trump’s campaign for president — but of Trump himself.
That's according to reactions from political analysts and elected officials, both Black and white.
Trump last week began questioning the racial identity of the vice president, falsely claiming during an interview with Black journalists that Harris was of Indian heritage but only recently “became Black.”
It’s a claim which Trump subsequently repeated. It’s also a false attack, as Harris long has identified as biracial, the daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother.
“First of all, Jonathan, to your point, she’s always been clear, open, and consistent up about a racial identity. Nobody gets to decide for her or speak on her behalf about that racial identity,” Valerie Jarrett, a one-time advisor to President Barack Obama, told journalist Jonathan Capehart in a TV interview. “Third of all, this is like an old playbook, and it’s really gotten kind of sad. This is the same thing that was tried 16 years ago with this birther nonsense, and you know what? It didn’t work then. It’s not going to work now.
“Why? The American people as evidenced by the incredible energy and enthusiasm we’ve seen in less than two weeks for her campaign they were really not focusing, they want to know: ‘Who is going to fight for me? Who was going to improve my life? Who is going to put me first? Who was going to realize this job is not about being self-centered, but by being open and inclusive to the American people,’” added Jarrett, herself Black. “And I think the fact that she received donations, many first-time donations, the cross-section of America is coming out with enthusiasm from her candidacy, and it is a candidacy that is joyful and hopeful and sees what we have in common and not our differences, and I think that’s what resonates. I think this old playbook didn’t work 16 years ago, and it’s not going to work now.”
Trump’s racist attacks won’t appeal to most voters in the upcoming presidential election, according to Doug Jones, a white former Democratic senator from Alabama.
“Donald Trump just gets more like himself every day despite the many advisers that he has got, he just cannot help himself. This is not going to work,” he said. “He has got whoever that rhetoric appeals to, he has got those folks, and they are going to either turn out, or they are not going to turn out, but he has got those folks.
“That kind of rhetoric is not appealing to the broad section of Americans, middle of Americans, any independents that might be out there, any people in America that just believe in the constitution and equal opportunity for everybody, they don’t like that, and I think that’s a major flaw, not just in the campaign, but in him,” Jones added.
People of color should not allow white Americans like Trump to control the definitions of race and racial identity, civil rights attorney and commentator Charles Coleman Jr, told Capehart.
"So, Jonathan, I think the first thing we have to understand is it’s a mistake for any of us to allow people who are not in our community to allow white people to allow others to begin to become the arbiters of what is and what isn’t Black,” he said. “It is important to understand the Black experience is incredibly nuanced and incredibly vast, so it does not necessarily fall in any particular stereotype or caption that people might want it to.
“Donald Trump does not have the space or the ability or the power to try and be the arbiter of blackness anymore than anyone else outside our community can say you do or do not belong to,” Coleman added. “I think the first mistake some of us have made is allowing that to take root as a conversation. If there’s anything that I would say around the vice president for potential response is that while we have had an opportunity to hear her talk about race I think this may be the point where she may need to lean into the notion of how racism is an attack being used against her.
“We’ve heard critics talk about her as vice president, whether America was a racist country. Now given everything she is facing might be the ideal opportunity to revisit that comment and reframe it in terms of how she wants to talk about race and its impact on the election,” Coleman said.
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