After Donald Trump told journalists on Wednesday that his presidential opponent Kamala Harris “turned Black” for political gain, Trump’s comments have impacted the way many multirace voters are thinking about the two candidates.
“She was only promoting Indian heritage,” the former president said during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week. “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.”
“Is she Indian or is she Black?” he asked.
She’s both.
Harris, whose mother was Indian and her father is Jamaican, would make history if she is elected president. She would be both the first female president and the first Asian American president.
Multiracial American voters say they have heard similar derogatory remarks about their identities their whole lives. Some identify with Harris’ politics more than others but, overall, they told NBC News that Trump’s comments will not go unnoticed.
In Obama’s case, he had an estranged father in Kenya who died in 1982. Kamala’s father is a tenured economy professor at Stanford (first black scholar granted tenure at Stanford too) and very much still alive at 85.
Kind of hard to sow doubts about her birth, when her father is not only living in the US, but also as an authority figure.
You are assuming that the birthers use logic. If that was the case, they would not have cared where Obama was born because his mother was an American born in Kansas. That would make him American even if he was born in Kenya or Canada (like Ted Cruz).
I hear your point, and you’re not wrong that certain birthers just won’t listen. Obama had neither of the people involved in this birth, his parents, around to speak about the conditions of his birth. Harris, though, will have people able to say, “No, I was there, I remember how it happened” in her corner.