Why Is Trump Obsessed With Saying Harris Isn’t Black?

It’s because he knows she’s Black. And because he’s a racist piece of shit.

Since Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee, Donald Trump has tried out various racist attacks against her. One of those is that she is not really Black since her mother was South Asian. Trump tried this line out before a disbelieving and repulsed audience yesterday at the Chicago convention of the National Association of Black Journalists.

"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 gabbled. “So I don't know - Is she Indian? Or is she Black?"

Trump lies all the time. And he is lying here. He is very aware that Harris is Black. It is because she is Black that he questions her identity.

Trump is a bone-headed, unthinking, instinctual gutter fascist. And as 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. They cannot speak for America. They cannot speak for themselves. White people are the spiritual truth; they are the only ones entitled to define themselves and to define America. Everyone else is fake news.

Trump started his foray into presidential politics by pushing the repulsive birther slur that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore was not really American, and not really president. The content of the disgusting smear against Harris seems different; he is saying she is not Black, rather than that she is not American. But really it’s the same line. Obama isn’t authentic; Harris isn’t authentic. They are not who they say they are—and indeed, they cannot be who they say they are, because for Trump they are unreal.

The only authentic truth for Trump is whiteness. White Christian people are the only ones who are entitled to real selves, which means they define who is and is not real. Trump is the fascist leader embodying the white volk, which means he’s entitled to define everyone else.

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.

That sounds like an extreme and ridiculous ideology. And so it is. But it’s also something that a lot of Americans believe in milder form. The media’s obsession with interviewing Trump voters in diners is based in the idea that there’s something especially authentic and true about white Trump voters in diners—something that isn’t authentic and true about, for instance, Black Biden voters in barbershops. The political press lost its shit when Hilary Clinton suggested some Trump voters were deplorable, because Trump voters are (overwhelmingly) white, and white people are the authentic truth of America. But when Trump calls Milwaukee a “horrible city,” it’s mostly shrugged off, because cities like Milwaukee are home to many non-white people, and non-white people are not thought of by the mostly white press as authentic Americans who all Americans must defend.

Trump has, then, benefited in the past from the fact that in a white supremacist society, many people have a good deal of sympathy for the idea that white people are more authentic than everyone else. He’s benefited from the fact that a lot white people (and some others) vaguely believe that white people should get to define everyone else.

However, at this point in America’s relationship with its own racism, you are not supposed to express these sentiments overtly. Dog whistles exist for a reason.

Trump has dispensed with the dog whistles. He is openly and explicitly claiming that he has the right to determine Harris’ racial identity. And again, while he says that he is attacking Harris because she is not Black enough, he is obviously attacking her because he knows that she is Black, and thinks that means that he is the arbiter of her self. As a white man, as a white supremacist, and as a flaming asshole, he believes he owns Harris’ self because she is Black.

That is the logic of white entitlement, white supremacy, and fascism. It is the logic of Trump’s political career; it was the logic of Trump’s presidency. He’s making that logic as horrifically clear as possible. Hopefully, in November, we’ll show him that Kamala Harris’ America is more real than he can handle.