Pop star Janet Jackson recently questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’s self-proclaimed racial identity, stating in an interview that Harris is not black. Speaking to The Guardian, Jackson responded to queries about the possibility of the United States electing its first black female president. “She’s not black, that’s what I heard, that she’s Indian,” Jackson remarked. She claimed she was informed that Harris’s father is white. “I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days,” she added.
When asked whether she believed the nation was ready for a female president of color, Jackson expressed uncertainty. “Honestly, I don’t want to answer that because I really truthfully don’t know,” she said. “I think either way it goes is going to be mayhem.”
Her comments echo similar sentiments expressed by former President Donald Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in July. Trump had asserted that Harris originally emphasized her Indian heritage at the start of her career but now identifies as black. “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump stated. “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.”
Trump continued, “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.”
Vice President Harris is the daughter of Donald J. Harris, a Jamaican-American professor at Stanford, and her mother, who is of Indian descent. Harris has faced scrutiny from some individuals who allege she identifies with different aspects of her ancestry depending on the circumstance. Recently, critics claimed she adopted a regional accent while speaking in Detroit, which then seemed to fade at a subsequent event in Pittsburgh the same day.
show less
