Trump's remark about Kamala Harris "suddenly" turning into a Black woman still manages to shock

Trump engaged in an asymmetrical attack that, as someone imbued with Whiteness, he himself will never have to face. Conference attendees were aghast.

Almost two weeks ago, I wrote an essay where I advocated that the Democratic Party pass on a Kamala Harris nomination, as it would unearth certain racial stereotypes, namely the Jezebel and the Sapphire. These two tropes — the first of the oversexed female virago, the second the overbearing Black succubus — would be rolled into one in an overarching attack on Harris as a person. In fact, Harris had come under attack as a Jezebel early on in her tenure as vice president, in 2021, with some notaries in the evangelical movement designating her as such.¹

These attacks indeed have been resurrected, as it were, with figures such as Lance Wallnau, a Seven Mountain Dominionist, affixing her with this label.² In fact, Wallnau said, Harris would be worse than Hillary Clinton in this respect, because she was younger and would bring a racial element into it.³

The attacks have risen to such prominence that they have attracted the attention of the press.⁴ Even such popular outlets as the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart delivering the punchlines, called attention to the use of this term.

The “Jezebel” / Willie Brown attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris are, strictly speaking, Puritanical in nature. Last night, on the Washington Post comment boards, I came across one comment speaking about the Harris-Brown relationship where it noted that Brown was married at the time of the relationship and Brown is married to the same person now. The comment really sought to cast Harris in this sidepiece, almost homewrecker role. Two commenters countering this troll post noted that Brown was legally separated from his spouse at the time.

The insinuation that Brown and Harris engaged in an extramarital affair is pernicious, because it does not accurately reflect reality. I have a model for this, as my own parents were separated for about ten years at the point of midlife, and I know for a fact that they both saw other people. It’s not realistic to expect separated people to enter into celibacy. Willie Brown had no obligation to be chaste, and neither did Harris for deciding to date him. The entire attack is a Puritanical smear.

The sidebar where Brown endorsed, recommended, or maybe even appointed (?) Harris to a citywide position when Brown was the mayor of San Francisco is harder to explain (at least for me, as I don’t know the particulars of that story). The scenario is more problematic than the context-less Jezebel slur, because such a move by Brown points to undue favoritism. Yet the height of undue favoritism is nepotism, and former president Donald Trump already blew past those ethical constraints when he installed his daughter and son-in-law into White House positions. So what are we really talking about here?

The Trump team is bringing up what could be considered improprieties because they want people to consider Harris to be improper. This underlies the specious charge also of Harris being a “DEI candidate,” the unspoken assertion being that Harris hasn’t earned her position but is there to fulfill some kind of aspirational quota. In other words, she’s unworthy. And the standard pushback of the Harris team and her defenders — that is, to highlight her accomplishments — does not fully neutralize this attack because, while the Harris advocates are obliged to rebut and refute, the Trump folks are instilling attitudes.

Attitudes are notoriously resistant to facts. Once set, they are stubborn, almost impossible to change. That’s why this clean-up after the fact really will not move the needle with those disinclined to extend to Harris the benefit of the doubt. 

The problem, of course, is that the badmouthing of Harris is tied to a rumor, an able vehicle for the propagation of attitudinal information. Bad word of mouth tends to spread. Unless the Harris team finds a way to get out in front of this, these rumors will flourish and harden like kudzu, where they will prove nearly impossible to remove.

It doesn’t help when the press gives Trump an assist. Take the Washington Post, which yesterday on Trump’s interview with the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). When, after Trump dithered about the definition of ‘DEI’, Trump was asked if he thought Harris was chosen as a presidential candidate solely due to her race and gender, Trump at first said no, then gave a meandering and ultimately nonsensical response about how at first Harris spoke of her Indian background but then one day suddenly “became a Black person.” He went on like this for an extended amount of time, maybe up to a full minute — a long time for spoken remarks!

ABC News reporter Rachel Scott, co-moderator: Some of your own supporters, including Republicans on Capitol Hill, have labeled Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the first Black and Asian-American woman to serve as vice president and be on a major-party ticket, as “a DEI hire.” Is that acceptable language to you? And will you tell those Republicans and those supporters to stop it?

Donald Trump: How do you — how do you define ‘DEI’? Go ahead. How do you define it?

Scott: Diversity, equity and inclusion . . . ?

Trump: Okay. Go ahead. Is that what your definition is?

Scott: That is — those are literally the words.

Trump: Give me the definition. Would you give me a definition of that? Give me a definition.

Scott: Sir, I’m asking you a question, a very direct question.

Trump: Well, define it. Define it for me, if you will.

Scott: I just defined it, sir. Do you believe that Vice President Kamala Harris is only on the ticket because she is a Black woman?

Trump: Well, I can say, no, I think it’s maybe a little bit different. So, I’ve known her a long time indirectly, not directly very much. And she was always of Indian heritage, and 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. And now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know — is she Indian, or is she Black?

Scott: She has always identified as a Black woman. She went to a historically Black college.

Trump: I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t. Because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went — she became a Black person.⁵

Clearly Trump meant to Otherize Harris. By claiming ignorance about her background — is she Indian or is she Black? — Trump raised the salience of Harris’s racial characteristics in the audience’s mind. He made race hyperreal by bringing it into hyperfocus, and he presented her two aspects of heritage as though they were mutually exclusive instead of coming into combination. He insinuated that Harris either was abandoning one aspect of her personal character to adopt wholesale another, or that her negritude was all a ruse. Either she’s confused or untrustworthy. Again, he’s laying down a narrative infrastructure, an attitudinal scaffold on which the audience can later drape all manner of unflattering and untoward information.

At first, the Washington Post reported this occurrence at NABJ fairly straightforwardly, remarking in its headline what Trump said and where he said it. "Trump says Harris ‘became a Black person’ as NABJ event turns hostile, chaotic," the headline read.

That was all well and good, and the comment section garnered more than 15,000 responses within just a couple of hours (since climbing past 25,000). Then, much later — around or nearing midnight — the headline was changed: “Harris faces a pivotal moment as Trump questions her identity.”⁶

The content of the article didn’t change, but the title did. It became something far more generic, rendering the headline benign and innocuous. By making this change, the editors by extension presented Trump’s behavior as benign and innocuous, because the header change was a change in frame. The reader understands a story by its frame of reference,⁷ and by shifting the frame the editors altered the way readers approached, interpreted, and internalized the story. In fact, the new headline neglected so much key information that a given reader may have skipped over the article altogether, because the bland title failed to put information in proper context.

The Washington Post, in other words, normalized Trump’s abhorrent and aberrant behavior, rendering it more acceptable by the bland and innocuous words used to describe the event. 

The frame adopted by the editors — revised down to make the happenstance seem like a run-of-the-mill, everyday event — itself goes quite the distance in normalizing a clear, textbook racist statement. The new frame accepts this corrosion of discourse, recasting it as a “new phase” of the 2024 campaign.⁸ It is telling the reader to accept this debased level of discourse as legitimate political speech. This is a power the editors should not wield. They risk reviving race as a political attack in a manner not seen since the ’60s and ’70s. We cannot afford as a nation to regress so thoroughly.

Not twenty years ago, running for re-election in 2006, GOP darling and Virginia senator George Allen was on the glide path to a 2008 presidential nomination, as he was widely projected to be the GOP favorite. It is somewhat quaint to recall that his entire campaign was derailed by footage of Allen pointing at and mocking a minority member of the crowd — S.R. Sidarth, an Indian American — at one of Allen’s speeches. (Sidarth was the one filming Allen at the time.)

Allen repeatedly called Sidarth ‘macaca’, a slur meaning “macaque”, a type of monkey. The slur was so recessed and subterranean that it had to be explained to the American people, but once the story was understood in all its full measure, Allen had to relinquish his presidential aspirations. With that one odious display, he had dashed his own dreams.

Trump obliterates that standard. Certainly part of that is a function of the press not only relaxing the old standard but normalizing what formerly would have been so beyond the pale that the candidate would be forced to withdraw. A vestige of that standard erupted into view when those thousands of comments exploded like a fireworks finale in response to that single Trump incident. People still have a sense that such things cannot and should not be tolerated — such words are an impermissible attack. The press must regain its gatekeeping role in this respect.

1. Jane Clayson and Samantha Raphaelson. “Unpacking What It Means to Call Kamala Harris a ‘Jezebel.’” WBUR, February 23, 2021.

2. Lance Wallnau of the New Apostolic Reformation is a Christian nationalist whose belief system (Seven Mountains Dominionism) advances the idea that the main pillars of civilization — government, education, media, arts and entertainment, religion, family, and business — can be represented as mountains. Once any one person or group takes posssession of all (or overwhelming majority) of these mountains, they have command over the nation. (I have previously written about Wallnau here.)

3. Melissa Gira Grant, “The Violent Implications of the ‘Jezebel’ Attacks on Kamala Harris.” The New Republic, July 25, 2024.

4. Hannah Allam and Clara Ence Morse. “As Harris steps up to face Trump, far-right attacks follow.” Washington Post, July 28, 2024.

5. It’s crucial to view and listen to Trump when he makes this claim, because there is a melody in his voice that gives away his intent. He’s very obviously lampooning Harris. The lilt in his voice is one I have been trying to place: on the one hand, it mimics the tone people use when they say, “That person should have known better”; on the other, it recalls the self-directed pep talk of the old Dunkin’ Donuts commercial, where the baker rises from bed and tells himself, “Time to make the doughnuts.” By using this melody, Trump is bringing in an element of the absurd.

6. It was changed later still to “Trump attacks Harris’s racial identity. Harris says Americans ‘deserve better.’” Washington Post, July 31, 2024.

7. “[A] frame of reference is based on certain standards of judgment, and . . . an attitude emerges when a given situation is appraised by means of a frame of reference.” Hadley Cantril, The Psychology of Social Movements (1941), p. 21. Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company: Huntington, New York.

8. Cleve R. Wootson, Jr., and Sabrina Rodriguez. “Trump’s attack on Harris’s racial identity moves contest into new phase.” Washington Post, July 31, 2024.