The Real Reason Donald Trump Is Making Racist Comments About Kamala Harris

During an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention this week, Donald Trump drew audible gasps from the crowd when he questioned the background of Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

“ 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,” the former president said about Harris . “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

“She was Indian all the way and then, all of a sudden, she made a turn and she went, she became a Black person,” Trump added. “I think somebody should look into that.”

Harris’ father is a Jamaican immigrant and her mother was an Indian immigrant. She attended Howard University, a prestigious historically Black university in Washington, D.C., where she pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha, a Black sorority.

Democrats were quick to condemn Trump’s comments, and many Republicans struggled to defend him.

But this attack line against Harris wasn’t a slip of the tongue or a product of an undisciplined politician. Questioning the identity of Black politicians is what made Trump into a Republican darling, and later the party’s standard-bearer.

“There are parallels between this and his attacks on Barack Obama,” said Donald Collins, a critical race, gender and culture studies professor at American University. “It’s about going after voters who have problems with [candidates’] identities.”

Trump infamously and baselessly claimed that Obama, who was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and white American mother, was not an American and therefore ineligible to be president. He spent years rallying conservatives around the so-called “birtherism” theory, pushing