Vice President Kamala Harris condemned former President Donald J. Trump’s remarks. But she also made it clear she would not engage in a debate with a white man critiquing her Blackness.
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“It was the same old show,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in Houston on Wednesday, referring to former President Donald J. Trump’s comments on her identity. “The divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better.”
Just hours after former President Donald J. Trump made false assertions about her racial identity, Vice President Kamala Harris had an extraordinary opportunity to respond.
Speaking on Wednesday night in Houston at a convention of one of the nation’s most prominent Black sororities, before an audience of thousands of Black women clad in gold blazers, Ms. Harris delivered a glimpse of how she might handle the crude and racist attacks from Mr. Trump that seem likely to continue over the next three months of a turbocharged presidential campaign.
With careful precision, the vice president acknowledged his statements, made at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, and condemned his behavior. But although she often casts herself as a fighter eager to confront Mr. Trump, she showed restraint on Wednesday, refusing to engage in a debate with a white man critiquing her Blackness.
“It was the same old show,” she said. “The divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better.”
Ms. Harris, whose mother was Indian American and whose father is Black, and who attended the historically Black Howard University, made only a brief diversion from her standard stump speech, addressing Mr. Trump’s false claims without directly engaging with them. He had said that she once identified as Indian American, and then “all of a sudden, she made a turn, and she became a Black person.”
Her surgical comments demonstrated an understanding that fighting the former president on his terms could amplify his lies, her allies said. A prolonged discussion of her racial identity could also distract voters from the issues that the Harris campaign believes will resonate most, such as abortion, economic inequality and the protection of democracy.
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