Fact check: Trump’s lie that Harris ‘all of a sudden’ embraced a Black identity

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, drew gasps on Wednesday when he said at the National Association of Black Journalists convention that Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, had suddenly adopted a Black identity.

Harris’ father is from Jamaica, her late mother from India. Trump claimed: “I’ve known her a long time, indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. 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. So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black?”

As one of the journalists who was interviewing Trump on stage tried to tell him that Harris had always identified as Black and had attended a historically Black college, Trump continued, “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t. Because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she went – she became a Black person. And I think somebody should look into that, too.”

Trump’s comments prompted immediate bipartisan criticism. Leaving aside the issue of the appropriateness of the remarks, his claims are just not true.

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. Harris did not “all of a sudden” begin identifying as Black. She has embraced and discussed her Black identity for decades, beginning long before she became a political candidate, while also honoring her South Asian heritage.

Harris graduated in 1986 from Howard University, a historically Black institution where she was a member of a historically Black sorority. After that, she was elected president of the association of Black law students in her second year at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, she wrote in her 2019 memoir.

Politico reported in 2021 that, as a third-year student at the law school in 1989, Harris rose to speak against anti-Black racism at a campus demonstration prompted by the discovery of racist vandalism. Politico reported: “For Black students, she said, according to archives of the Hastings Law News, the cartoon was an example of ‘what we deal with all the time.’”

A profile of Harris in the publication AsianWeek in 2003, when she was running for San Francisco district attorney, was focused on her South Asian heritage. But it quoted Harris discussing her father as “a Black man” and saying, “I grew up with a strong Indian culture, and I was raised in a Black community. All my friends were Black and we got together and cooked Indian food and painted henna on our hands, and I never felt uncomfortable with my cultural background.”

Harris’ official online biography in 2005 as San Francisco district attorney referred to her as “the first African American woman in California to hold the office” and noted that she had attended “America’s oldest black university.” She wrote in a 2009 book about her childhood trips to both India and Jamaica, where, she wrote, “my father and uncles would talk to us about the complicated struggles of the people of Jamaica – the history of slavery, colonialism, and immigration.”

Her official online biography as California attorney general referred to her as “the first African American woman and South Asian American woman in California to hold the office” of San Francisco district attorney. In 2017, her first year as a US senator for California, she spoke about how she was “the second Black woman elected to the United States Senate.”

Harris wrote in the 2019 memoir about how her mother’s family instilled her and her sister Maya with “pride in our South Asian roots,” but also that “my mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.”

Harris said in another 2017 speech: “Look at my own life, where a daughter of a South Asian mother and a Jamaican father concluded her own interfaith wedding with her husband breaking a glass and everyone yelling, ‘Mazel tov.’”

A litany of Trump false claims

Trump made numerous other false claims in his remarks at the Wednesday gathering.
Among other claims we have fact-checked before, Trump:

– Wrongly referred to Harris as President Joe Biden’s “border czar.” Her actual immigration-related assignment from Biden, to lead a diplomatic effort to tackle “root causes” of migration in three Central American countries, was much more limited.

– Falsely claimed that the US has its worst inflation in “over 100 years.” Even at its 9.1% peak during the Biden presidency, inflation was at about a 41-year high, and it has since plummeted to 3%.

– Falsely claimed he was “protected” under the Presidential Records Act for taking official documents after his presidency. That law actually requires presidents to return all documents to the federal government when they leave office.

– Falsely claimed that “everybody,” including Democrats, wanted Roe v. Wade overturned and the issue of abortion policy returned to individual states. In fact, polls have consistently shown about two-thirds of the public as a whole and an even higher percentage of Democrats had wanted Roe to be preserved.

– Repeated his never-substantiated claim about foreign countries opening up their prisons to allow criminals to migrate to the US.

– Falsely claimed that Haris “didn’t pass” the bar exam. Harris failed on her first attempt, which is common in California, but then passed; she was admitted to the California bar in 1990, the year after she graduated from law school. (Trump, appearing to respond to an objection from someone in the crowd, conceded a bit later that Harris “maybe” had passed.)

– Falsely claimed that “nobody died” on January 6, 2021. Four Trump supporters at the Capitol died that day, three from medical emergencies and one after she was shot by police while trying to break into a sensitive part of the building. (Trump mentioned the shooting right before he claimed nobody died.) In addition, Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who was attacked with pepper spray during the riot, died after suffering strokes the next day; the medical examiner found that Sicknick died of natural causes, but also told The Washington Post that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, Em Steck and Julie In contributed to this article.

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