Donald Trump is at it again. He seems determined to turn the 2024 presidential campaign into another ugly contest about the meaning of race and identity.
On Wednesday at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump parried an inquiry about whether he believed that Vice President Kamala Harris is a DEI candidate by questioning her racial identity. He answered, “I think I can say that maybe it’s a little bit different. I’ve known her a long time indirectly, and she was always of Indian heritage.”
Trump continued, “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.” As Axios put it, what he said on Wednesday is “Trump’s new birtherism.”
The phrase “to turn Black” was a flippant and ugly distortion and inversion of a racial history in which being Black meant being subordinated in America’s racial hierarchy, and passing as white became, for some, a key to survival. And it has nothing to do with the reality of what the New York Times calls Kamala Harris’s “dual racial identities.”
As the Times notes, “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. She has spoken extensively about growing up in what she described as a Black community in Berkeley, Calif.” Talking about her mother, Harris has said, “She had two Black babies, and she raised them to be two Black women.”
But Trump is uninterested in those facts. Instead, he wants to stoke irrational fears of people passing as Black to derive unfair advantage and hopes to provoke resentment against Harris among both Indian-Americans and Black Americans.
That is why Trump claimed, “She wants to be known as Black. I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? I respect either one but she obviously doesn’t. She was Indian all the way, and all of a sudden she made a turn. She became a Black person. I think someone should look into that.”
Whatever else it did, this outrageous assertion succeeded in doing a couple of things.
First, it ensured that Trump would own the news cycle and that everyone would be discussing what he said and why he said it. My piece is one bit of evidence of his success in that endeavor.
Second, it resurrected a familiar part of the Trump playbook in which he raises doubts about the background and authenticity of political opponents. We’ve seen it before in his use of birtherism to try to discredit former President Barack Obama and his attacks on Senator Elizabeth Warren in the early phases of the 2020 presidential campaign.
The remark about Harris’s race showed yet again Trump’s true colors.
As the Times noted, “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.”
His comments about Harris “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.”
Racial identity is complex, and racial categories are fluid. In a free world, individuals and their communities get to define their identities rather than having them imposed on them from the outside.
Trump resists such complexity and such freedom.
Trump knows what he is doing. As the journalist German Lopez puts it, the kind of comments that Trump made about Harris’s racial identification “are not just incidental to Trump; they are at the core of his political success.”
He plays to the fears of those who have benefited from white privilege and now worry about a world in which that privilege can no longer be assumed or taken for granted.
As the feminist and anti-racist activist Peggy McIntosh explained more than three decades ago, white privilege is “an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in every day, but what about which I was meant to remain oblivious white privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of social provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.”
Talking about the possibility that America will no longer blithely accept the unequal distribution of racial privilege, McIntosh explains Trump’s kind of reaction this way, “When you’ve had as much freedom to do what you want to do and think what you want and say what you want and act as you please, then you get irrationally rankled at having to curtail your life and your thought in any way.”
Trump may be “irrationally rankled,” but in questioning Harris’s identity as a Black woman, he is conjuring up a fear of what in conservative circles is called “Black privilege.”
The term has been used for a long time, as CNN notes, “as a rhetorical counterattack to the growing use of the term ‘white privilege.’ It’s part of a larger transformation: White is becoming the new black.” Indeed, a decade ago, the conservative writer David Horowitz published “Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream.”
Three years later, when Barack Obama was in the White House, Horowitz claimed that “Black privilege is so pervasive that it’s hard to miss. College professors practicing ‘affirmative grading’ hold black students to lower standards than others. Corporations offer programs and internships to black workers but not to whites.”
Black privilege, Horowitz argued, “even extends to the White House…. Barack Obama was an inexperienced presidential candidate who was elected because Americans wanted to experience a post-racial sugar high…. ‘He wouldn’t be elected dogcatcher if he wasn’t black.’”
Not surprisingly, views about racial privilege break down along both racial and partisan lines.
A 2017 Pew poll found that “An overwhelming majority of blacks (92%) say whites benefit a great deal or a fair amount from advantages that blacks do not have, including 68% who say they benefit a great deal. By comparison, 46% of whites say whites benefit at least a fair amount from advantages in society that blacks don’t have, and just 16% of whites say whites benefit a great deal.”
Pew reported that
The gap between Republicans and Democrats also is stark. Nearly eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (78%) say white people benefit a great deal or a fair amount from advantages unavailable to black people; just 21% say they do not benefit at all or do not benefit too much. The views of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are nearly the opposite: 27% say whites benefit a great deal or a fair amount from societal advantages, compared with 72% who say they do not benefit at all or do not benefit too much.
A study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in 2018 found that “More than four in ten (41%) white Americans, compared to less than one in five black (18%) and Hispanic (18%) Americans, believe there is a lot of discrimination against whites in the country today. Republicans (48%) are also more likely than Democrats (22%) to say that whites face a lot of discrimination.”
And, as Pew reports, those who “do not think white people benefit from advantages in society” or think they are the subjects of discrimination are much more likely to support Trump than those who think whites “greatly benefit from advantages blacks don’t have.” The latter group “are nearly unanimous in their disapproval of Trump.”
Trump’s comments about Harris turning Black play to racial resentments that have a long history. The sociologist David Garland says they have been particularly pronounced in transitional moments like our own “in which older mechanisms of racial domination and social control had either been dismantled or else were no longer perceived to be effective….” Those moments are often “experienced by many white communities as…an intolerable threat” to their status and authority.
What Trump said about Kamala Harris’s race played to those feelings. They also revealed, yet again, his true colors and the emptiness of the promise he made at the Republican National Convention to “heal” the “discord and division in our society” and “to be president for all of America.”
Trump provided a stark reminder that Americans will have a choice in November about whether we want to embrace a vision of this country in which a person who identifies as Indian-American and Black can ascend to the highest office in the land or whether we want to endorse suspicion and resentment as a key to success in our political lives.
