A group of Black male voters in Pennsylvania recently told a local reporter that they did not view Vice President Kamala Harris as being Black.
On Saturday’s “Smerconish” conversation, CNN host Michael Smerconish played a clip from local CBS news affiliate reporter Joel D. Smith after he asked prospective Black male voters at a barbershop last week what they think of Harris.
“Is Kamala gonna make you a little more likely or less likely to vote Democrat?” Smith asked the men.
One of the men waited for the next question to come out before he looked at The Barber and said, “Greg, hold on Greg. Is Kamala Black, yes or no?”
“I’m gonna let her speak on that, but to me, no,” he responded.
The man then turned to the others sitting next to him and asked the same question.
“I share that same view,” one responded.
“I heard she wasn’t,” another said. “I heard she’s half Black and half Asian.”
At one point, Smerconish said he had played an audio version of the clip on his radio show Thursday and pointed out that viewers reminded him this week that these men do not speak for all African Americans.
“When I played that audio on my Sirius XM radio program on Thursday, many callers who self-identified as African-American were quick to tell me that those men were the exception, not the rule. Some described them as low-information voters, no different than you’d find among Whites,” Smerconish reported.
He also pointed out that the video was shot before Trump’s public appearance at NABJ, where he got into a heated exchange with a yearning source. Trump said Harris changed race during the Q & A event.
Trump stated, “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said. “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?”
Trump was quickly criticized for his comments about Harris’ “Blackness.”
“To walk into a room full of Black journalists and attack someone’s ‘Blackness’ is another level of disrespect. To anyone who needs a reminder: we can’t change the color of our skin, and we don’t want to,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson wrote.
“I understand he is a candidate for president, but Republicans have generally refused to attend our conventions or speak at them. And he has done that so, why now? Because he is trying to discredit Vice President Kamala Harris? And I don’t think that is fair to our membership,” longtime NABJ member Justice B. Hill said.
