Did you catch former President Donald Trump’s appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists July 31 in Chicago?
It was mesmerizing, and not in a good way.
The former president’s task was easy: Go in and talk about how his second term as president could help the country’s black population and criticize Kamala Harris’ record. Before President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, polling suggested that Trump might eat into the black population’s support for the president.
I’m not sure this is still true.
Instead of heeding his advisers’ counsel to distinguish himself from Harris over policy and vision, Donald Trump went on stage and proceeded to turn into my bigoted white Southern great-cousin once-removed circa 1975. I say this as a white Southern man who lived through the 1970s in the Deep South.
It was not pretty. Trump’s advisers counseled him prior to his appearance to avoid “race” so as not to alienate certain constituencies he needed to win the November election.
But Trump being Trump, he made Kamala Harris’ racial identity the focus, suggesting she had misled the American people by playing up her Indian ancestry at the expense of her Black 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?” he told the audience.
Kamala Harris was pretending to not be black all those years? Really?
Kamala Harris, who attended Howard University, one of the most famous historically black higher education institutions in the country?
Who pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Greek-letter organization founded by black college women, according to the National Museum of African American History and Culture?
Who has talked openly about her mother from India being “determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women”?
Trump’s performance last week led folks to social media to tell the world about the first time they realized they were black.
Some of the videos were tongue-in-cheek and funny. Others were the opposite of that.
One woman pegged her realization that she was black to the time she was called the N word in elementary school by a white girl. Another spoke of realizing she was black when she was disinvited to a friend’s birthday party as a child when her friend’s parents discovered her skin color. Still another spoke of her mother parting the sea of white children calling her and her sibling racial slurs to fetch them from school.
Kamala Harris could not hide being black in this country. The United States has done its best throughout its history to remind black people who they are, flattening out the complexities of being a human being with an easy-to-digest reductionist label.
And here we were last week, with yet another white person questioning a non-white person’s identity.
There is an upside to Trump’s performance. It’s a reminder that white people, not Black people, or Indigenous people, or Hispanics, or Asian Americans, created “identity” politics. White folks have been playing this game for forever.
The racial categories we use today were created by the people who have held power in the United States since the country’s founding: White people. Racial categories were — and still are — a way to use skin color to parcel out public goods — jobs, housing, education, less expensive loans.
Since I began paying attention to politics nearly 40 years ago, innumerable white folk have complained in my presence about “identity politics.”
Stop it, folks. To the next white person who feels the temptation to trot out the “identity politics” nonsense in my presence, don’t. All you’re doing is showing you don’t know your American history.
Finally, in suggesting that Harris has to choose between her Indian heritage and her Black ancestry, what is Donald Trump saying to all the beautiful mixed-race children in New Mexico whose parents and grandparents dream of their little ones not having to choose like they had to, I cannot say this loud enough. I do not want to go back to the way things once were when I was growing up in the Deep South.
Watching the presidential race play out in real time, I get the sense I’m not alone in this sentiment.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle, before working at newspapers in California, Florida and Connecticut where he reported on many stories, including the resignation and incarceration of Connecticut’s then-governor, John Rowland, and gang warfare in California. Since 2005, Trip has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. He holds a Master’s of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.
