Donald Trump Says Kamala Harris ‘Happened to Turn Black’ as He Questions Her Race at Black Journalists’ Convention

At the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention in Chicago on July 31, Trump falsely suggested that Harris has mischaracterized her race

Donald Trump questioned Kamala Harris’ race on Wednesday, July 31, saying he “didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black.”

Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president after Joe Biden dropped out of the race, is both Indian and Black. The daughter of immigrant parents, Harris was born to mother Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher, who came to the United States from India. Her father, economist Donald Harris, was born in Jamaica.

“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,” Trump, 78, said, during remarks given at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention in Chicago. “So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

Harris made history in 2020 as the first woman vice president and also the first Black person and first person of Asian descent to hold the office.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded to Trump’s remarks during a press conference shortly after, telling reporters, “It’s insulting and no one has any right to tell someone who they are how they identify,” per the Associated Press.

Trump often discusses race on the campaign trail, and notoriously platformed the conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.

Obama, born in Hawaii to an American mother and a father from Kenya, answered questions about his background by providing his verified short-form birth certificate in 2008, and his verified long-form birth certificate again in 2011.

But Trump then questioned the authenticity of those documents, in what critics saw as a continued racist pursuit.

In his new memoir, Fred C. Trump III — the son of Trump’s late brother Fred Trump Jr. — claims that Trump has used the N-word in casual conversation. Bill Pruitt, an unscripted television producer who worked on the first two seasons of Trump’s NBC reality show, separately told Slate that the former president used the N-word to describe one of his first-ever finalists on The Apprentice, Kwame Jackson.

Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung has called both of those allegations false.

The AP reports that Trump’s appearance at Wednesday’s NABJ convention was at times contentious.

He accused ABC News’ Rachel Scott of giving him a “very rude introduction” with a tough first question about his past criticism of Black people and Black journalists, his attack on Black prosecutors who have pursued cases against him, and the dinner he had at his Florida club with a White supremacist.