After Donald Trump told journalists on Wednesday that his presidential opponent Kamala Harris “turned Black” for political gain, Trump’s comments have impacted the way many multirace voters are thinking about the two candidates.
“She was only promoting Indian heritage,” the former president said during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last week. “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.”
“Is she Indian or is she Black?” he asked.
She’s both.
Harris, whose mother was Indian and her father is Jamaican, would make history if she is elected president. She would be both the first female president and the first Asian American president.
Multiracial American voters say they have heard similar derogatory remarks about their identities their whole lives. Some identify with Harris’ politics more than others but, overall, they told NBC News that Trump’s comments will not go unnoticed.
The incidious persistence of many systems of oppression can often be at least partially attributed to people in the “middle tears” actively participating in the system simply to avoid being the bottom rung…
To some, a candidate that will prop them up at the expense of a different group is a subconscious survival adaptation
So I wouldn’t say they’re dumb necessarily, just that they’ve been indoctrinated from childhood into the same system that keeps them down
(I say this as an Asian American that has had to really struggle with the duality of how I treated black and indigenous people in the past, during times when I understood and personally experienced the ill effects of racism. Time when I recognized and accepted that racism exists and claimed it unfair when it happened to me)