Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) has called out the “sad irony” in former President Donald Trump’s recent attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris, in which he questioned her Black racial identity.
During a Wednesday appearance on CNN’s “Laura Coates Live,” Warnock slammed Trump, who spoke at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention in Chicago earlier that day, for promoting “division and hatred” by falsely accusing Harris of not previously identifying as Black.
“He doesn’t even recognize the sad irony of his remark,” said Warnock, who is Black. “In a real sense, Kamala Harris’ story is an iteration of the American story. The diversity that is among us and often within us.”
“She carries that literally in her veins,” he later continued. “In that sense, he doesn’t know who we are.”
“If you don’t know us, you can’t represent us — you certainly can’t lead us.”
Among the several falsehoods Trump spewed onstage during his contentious appearance at the NABJ convention, the former president implied that Harris had previously only identified as Indian.
“I’ve known [Harris] a long time indirectly, not directly very much, and she was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said. “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?”
“She has always identified as a Black woman,” said Rachel Scott, a senior congressional correspondent for ABC News.
“I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t,” Trump continued. “I think somebody should look into that.”
Scott Olson via Getty Images
Harris is both Black and South Asian. She was born in California and is the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants.
The vice president, who attended a historically Black university and is a member of a historically Black sorority, has always identified as a Black woman.
Others have called out the fact that attacks on Harris’ Black racial identity disregard the differences between race, ethnicity and nationality.
Harris responded to Trump’s remarks during an appearance hours later at a conference in Houston, Texas, hosted by the historically Black sorority Sigma Gamma Rho.
The vice president told the crowd that Trump’s remarks were “the same old show, the divisiveness and the disrespect.”
“The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts,” she said. “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us.”