Kamala Harris gave her most thorough response yet to her rival’s attacks on her racial identity during Tuesday’s debate, skewering Donald Trump after he suggested—again—that she might not actually be Black.
Trump was clearly unfazed by the widespread backlash he received after questioning Harris’ race in July at a Black journalists conference. He said on the debate stage that he “read somewhere she was not Black ... and then I read that she was Black.”
Trump added: “That’s OK. Either one was OK with me. That’s up to her.”
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Harris was pointed in her response—remaining calm but thoroughly skewering the former president for his flippant comments on race that go back to him spreading conspiracies about Barack Obama’s birthplace.
“Honestly, it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people,” she said.
Harris continued: “You know, I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us, and we don’t want this kind of approach that is just constantly trying to divide us, and especially by race.”
The vice president went on to resurface the story of the time Trump took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times to call for the execution of the Central Park 5—a group of minorities who were wrongfully convicted of raping a woman jogging in New York City in 1989.
