The Weekly Sift

Thanks, Donald. Without your help, I never would have found a truly endearing Kamala video.

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It all started with Donald Trump saying something that made even less sense than he usually does. Wednesday in Chicago, during his half-hour interview at a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, he called attention to the great conundrum of Kamala Harris’ biracial identity.

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?

The first thing to note about this comment, which I’ll forget if I don’t mention it right away, is that it’s a lie. Not just that Harris has been open about her blackness all along, but that Trump himself knew.

Trump donated to Harris twice in 2011 and 2014, during her campaign for attorney general of California, around the time she was being touted as “the female Obama” precisely because she is Black. In 2020, a Trump campaign spokesperson pointed to those donations as proof that Trump was not racist, saying, “I’ll note that Kamala Harris is a Black woman and he donated to her campaign, so I hope we can squash this racism argument now.”

Now on to the “Is she Indian or is she Black?” part. I plan to say some serious things in this article, but I won’t be able to get through it without mixing in some humor, because I just can’t pretend that I’m taking this question seriously. I mean, we’re not talking about the wave/particle duality of light here. Harris was born in Oakland to a mother from India and a Black Jamaican father. That really shouldn’t be hard to understand, even if you’re a 78-year-old ex-president whose Secretary of State once called him “a fucking moron” and whose top economic adviser judged him to be “dumb as shit“. According to the 2020 census, multiracial people make up over 1/10th of the US population, so you might expect Trump to have met such a person at some time or another.

Knowing that Harris likes to use Venn diagrams, The F*cking News made one to help her explain the situation.

And Trump’s notion that Kamala at some point “turned Black” evoked memories of a 2016 SNL cold open..

But enough levity: What is going on here?

Unfortunately, I can’t start discussing that question without getting into the ways Trump has dug himself in deeper. I mean, we all say really, really dumb things from time to time, especially under pressure. But after the fact, most of us try to compensate in one of two ways: We either apologize, or we just shut up and hope everybody forgets about it. (That’s the great virtue of the current era: No matter how badly you embarrass yourself, the 24-hour news cycle rolls on, and your blunders will soon scroll off everybody’s news feeds.)

But not Donald Trump. After having time to listen to advisers and think it through, he has spent the last several days continuing to make some kind of a controversy out of Harris simultaneously identifying both with her mother’s family and her father’s family, like that’s just impossible without some kind of betrayal or duplicity.

Remember Trump’s birther days, when he claimed that the detectives he had sent to Hawaii to investigate Obama’s birth certificate “cannot believe what they’re finding”? (Michael Cohen has since verified what I long suspected: “He never sent anybody anywhere, he just said it and everybody sort of bought into it.”) Well, birtherism is back: On TruthSocial, Trump reposted Laura Loomer’s image of Kamala’s birth certificate, which lists her father as coming from Jamaica, not Africa (which no one ever claimed).

He also posted a photo of Harris with her mother’s Indian family, as if that proved something. See: She’s been claiming all along to be Indian, so she can’t possibly have been Black.

But the crowning piece of Trump’s evidence is a video where Kamala herself says “I am Indian.” It’s a 36-second clip from a longer video of Kamala cooking with another Indian-American woman.

Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony.

But he couldn’t even edit the video well enough to make his point: The two women agree that they both have South Indian roots, and Kamala says, “You look like the entire one-half of my family.” The host is not at all confused about Harris’ family having another half, because why would she be? It’s perfectly simple, as everyone but Trump understands.

But here I got curious: I myself have been experimenting with cooking Indian food lately, so I couldn’t help wondering what they made. It wasn’t hard to find out that the other woman was the actress Mindy Kaling, and from there a little googling led to a 9-minute video on Kamala’s own YouTube channel. It was made in 2019, the first time Kamala ran for president. They’re cooking masala dosa.

You should absolutely watch this; I wish I could get every voter to watch it. It’s most endearing, humanizing view of Kamala Harris I’ve ever seen. (Thank you, Donald, for helping me find it.) It’s two women cooking together, laughing a lot, and bonding over memories of how their mothers cooked. (Both families stored their spices in re-purposed Taster’s Choice Coffee jars.)

If you get charmed by it, watch the follow-up of other Indian-American women’s reactions.

I find it impossible to imagine a comparable Trump video. I know cooking is typically a female bonding thing, so I wouldn’t expect to see Trump cook with anybody. But translate this into male stereotypes any way you want: fishing, outdoor grilling, carpentry, going to the big game. Trump could never make a video like this, because Trump doesn’t bond; he either dominates or submits. He’s either the Big Dog, or the runt who trails after the Big Dog (as Trump did with Putin in Helsinki).

The other thing I can’t imagine is anybody thinking this video disproves the authenticity of Harris’ blackness. Whose character is so narrow that there isn’t room to be different with different people, while still being yourself? (The Emmy-winning TV series “Severance” resonates precisely because it builds on the common experience of being different at work than you are at home.) Being both Indian and Black doesn’t make Harris “a chameleon”, as J. D. Vance charged. It makes her a typical resident of our complex 21st century society. (You’d think J. D. would understand biracial identity, since his own children are both Indian and White. Do you think he’ll make them choose someday?)

Which brings us back to the question: What is Trump doing? He’s lying. He knows he’s lying. He’s saying something incredibly stupid and then doubling down on it. But why?

Some writers warn us not to overthink questions like this. Trump’s niece Mary advises:

After eight years of covering Donald, too many journalists have gotten into the habit of seeing strategy in his crude and instinctive behavior. The truth is quite simple–Donald can’t help himself. When it comes to him, we shouldn’t overthink it. He is exactly what he seems: a racist, a misogynist, a liar.

And Josh Marshall agrees:

[W]e don’t have to fall into this Trump confusion matrix where we’re kind of beguiled by some mysterious, secret, ingenious plan that explains why a bizarre racist outburst that normal people look at and think “What’s wrong with him?” is actually a genius political move. It’s just an outburst and attempted reset. No more, no less.

But at the risk of giving Trump too much credit, let’s start with a simpler question: Why did he accept the NABJ invitation to begin with? Three possibilities present themselves:

• He wanted to appeal for Black votes. This wouldn’t be unreasonable, given Trump/Biden polls that showed him making inroads with Black men. But if that had been his motive, he would have behaved differently. He’d have fended off aggressive questions without rancor and repeatedly returned to nostalgia for the pre-Covid economy, as if anything in his policy proposals would bring it back. The fact that he was combative from the very first question indicates that he wasn’t there to win Black votes.
• He wanted to convince White suburban voters that he’s not racist. Overt racism plays badly among educated suburban voters, especially women. That’s why dog whistling was invented: to appeal to White racists without scaring White moderates. That’s also why all Trump’s campaigns have been so diligent about recruiting somebody to stand behind him at rallies with a “Blacks for Trump” sign. It’s not important that Trump have much actual Black support, but he has to appear to have Black support, to placate White moderates. From this point of view, the ideal thing would have been to make no real news at the NABJ convention. Then the story would be the simple fact of Trump’s appearance before a Black audience rather than anything he said. Obviously, that’s not what happened.
• He wanted to pick fights that will appeal to his White racist base. This interview will produce many clips that will go viral in the White racist echo chamber: Black women try to trap Trump, but he is not intimidated and stands up to them, challenging the suggestion that he is too chicken to debate Harris, and proving that he will stand up for you when the critical race theory goblins come for you.

It seems clear to me that the third option is correct: Trump’s false claim that Harris wasn’t Black until recently, and that before that she only emphasized the Asian half of her heritage, only makes sense if you’re playing to a White racist audience. Black people understand that being only half African is more than enough to get racists to treat you as Black. And choosing to emphasize some other part of your heritage is never an option, because racism isn’t a choice you make, it’s a choice racists make about you. Also, non-racist Whites have no trouble processing the notion of mixed-race, which Trump seems so confused by.

So Trump’s script casts the Black journalists as antagonists in his performance as the Champion of Beleaguered White Men. Once you see that, his subsequent actions only need to make sense in the worldview of racist White men, who often frame race as a scam, a way for non-Whites to claim some kind of sympathy or benefit. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer spells it out.

Trump’s attack on Harris is meant to evoke this worldview, in which Black advancement is a kind of liberal conspiracy to deprive white people of what is rightfully theirs. Trump is saying that Harris became Black only when it was obvious that being Black conferred social advantage. … Trump’s smear of Harris is also an accusation of racial disloyalty—that she was ashamed of being Black until it was politically convenient. Racial treason is something Trump finds particularly offensive. He has begun referring to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, as “Palestinian,” doubly racist in that it turns Palestinian into an epithet and castigates a Jewish man for being insufficiently loyal to his own people. The idea that liberal Jews are not truly Jewish operates similarly to Trump’s attack on Harris, in that it gives the speaker permission to attack a Jewish target in anti-Semitic terms because the target is not “truly” Jewish. Attacking Harris in racist terms, under this logic, is not racist, because she is not “truly” Black. The point of this rhetorical maze is simply to justify racist attacks on a particular target while deflecting accusations of bigotry.

And Noah Berlatsky elaborates:

[A]s a fascist, he believes that only white people—or more specifically, only his own white cishet Christian male voters—are authentic and real. Everyone else, to Trump, is fake and inauthentic. … Trump can say that Jewish people who don’t vote for him, “hate their religion,” because as a white Christian fascist, he defines what Jewishness means. He can say Obama isn’t American, because as a white Christian fascist, he defines what America is. He can say Harris isn’t Black, because he is the fascist leader, and he defines what Blackness is. For that matter, he can lie about crowd size, about the weather, about his own actions and beliefs, because as the white fascist patriarch, he is the one authentic measure of truth. He is real. Nothing else is.

Serwer and Berlatsky were writing before Trump began smearing Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, both on Truth Social and at his Atlanta rally, referring to her as “a good male boxer” who “transitioned”, and pledging “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS.” Khelif is female from birth, and gender transitions are illegal in Algeria, but what does it matter? As the fascist leader, Trump defines what gender means.

In short, Trump was trying to stoke up the energy of his base by appealing to their sense of racial and gender grievance, promoting resentment that women and people of color are taking what is rightfully theirs, and arguing that they are doing it under the false flags of anti-racism and anti-sexism, because racism and sexism haven’t been a thing in decades and were never that big a deal to begin with.

The fact that he may have confused or angered anyone else, like me or you, is just a side effect.

I don’t have any special insight into the White racist community, so I’m not sure how well this is working. I can only trust that White racists are not a majority of the electorate, and hope that the rest of us show up in large enough numbers to outvote them.