Chuck Darwin<p>“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. <br>So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Harris, whose mother was Indian American and whose father is Black.</p><p>The moment was shocking, but for those who have followed Mr. Trump’s divisive language, <br>it was hardly surprising. </p><p>♦️The former president has a history of using race to pit groups of Americans against one another, amplifying a strain of racial politics that has risen as a generation of Black politicians has ascended♦️</p><p>The audacity of Mr. Trump, a white man, questioning how much a Black woman truly belongs to Black America was particularly incendiary.</p><p>And it evoked 🔷an ugly history in this country, in which white America has often declared the racial categories that define citizens, and sought to determine who gets to call themselves what.🔷</p><p>“Give me a break,” said Fred Sweets, a contributing editor at The St. Louis American who watched the discussion from the third row. <br>“He seemed to be denigrating her background. She knows who she is.”</p><p>Ms. Harris has embraced her dual racial identities. </p><p>She has long identified as Black and was shaped by several Black institutions. She graduated from Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C., and there joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest Black sorority. </p><p>She has spoken extensively about growing up in what she described as a Black community in Berkeley, Calif.</p><p>"She had two Black babies, and she raised them to be two Black women,” Harris told The New York Times in a 2016 interview about her mother.</p><p>On Wednesday evening, Ms. Harris responded to Mr. Trump’s comment at an event hosted by one of the nation’s most prominent Black sororities, saying they showed “<a href="https://c.im/tags/divisiveness" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>divisiveness</span></a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/disrespect" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>disrespect</span></a>.”</p><p>“The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth,” she said, making no direct reference to Mr. Trump’s personal attacks. </p><p>“We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us <br>— they are an essential source of our strength.”</p><p>Attacks on Ms. Harris’s racial background have circulated among right-wing figures and Mr. Trump’s close allies for years.</p><p>In 2019, Donald Trump Jr. shared a social media post from an alt-right personality that falsely claimed Ms. Harris was <br>🔥not Black enough 🔥to be discussing the plight of Black Americans during a primary debate. </p><p>Though Mr. Trump later deleted the post, it spread widely across conservative social media, prompting a wave of accounts to question her background, <br>👉which was exactly the point of the effort, according to some far-right activists.<br><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/us/politics/trump-harris-race.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">nytimes.com/2024/07/31/us/poli</span><span class="invisible">tics/trump-harris-race.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare</span></a></p>