The barbershop was buzzing with controversy.
A viral video clip shows multiple black men in a Dauphin County, Pennsylvania barbershop openly questioning whether Vice President Kamala Harris is “black.”
Harris, 59, who is biracial — the daughter of a Jamaican-American father and an Indian-American mother, has been subject to attacks about her race. Last week Trump questioned her racial identity and suggested that she only recently started identifying as black.
The clip, from a local CBS affiliate, starts with reporter Joel Smith asking, “Is Kamala gonna make you a little more likely or less likely to vote Democrat?”
One of the men promptly spoke up and quizzed his peers, asking them, “Is Kamala black, yes or no?”
A man next to him, bluntly replied that he’d “let her speak on that, but to me, no.”
“I share that same view,” another man in the group said.
“I heard she wasn’t,” a fourth man explained. “I heard she’s half black and half Asian.”
CNN host Michael Smerconish aired a clip of that exchange on his Saturday program and told viewers that he previously played the segment on his radio program and black callers described the men as “low information voters.”
Trump stirred up controversy over Harris’ racial identity last Wednesday during an appearance at a National Association of Black Journalists event in Chicago, during which he questioned her race.
“I’ve known her a long time indirectly — not directly very much — and 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,” Trump said at the time.
“Now she wants to be known as black so I don’t know is she Indian or is she black,” he went on. “But you know what, I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t.”
That comment quickly ignited a firestorm. At the time, Trump had been asked about conservatives who labeled Harris a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hire. That’s a reference to President Biden pledging in 2020 that he’d tap a woman as his veep. Trump largely demurred on the DEI question.
“It was the same old show,” Harris responded later in the day during remarks at a prominent black sorority event in Houston. “The divisiveness and the disrespect. And let me just say, the American people deserve better.”
Before Biden’s abrupt exit from the 2024 contest on July 21, polls had suggested that Trump was making modest gains among black voters.
Data from Pew Research, for example, found that 77% of black voters leaned toward Biden, while 18% favored Trump. The trend was particularly pronounced among black men.
For context, 92% of black voters supported Trump in 2020, while Trump got just 8%, per Pew Research. Other exit polling data pegged Biden beating Trump with black voters in 2020 by 87% to 12%.
Now Harris has been catapulted to the top of the Democratic ticket. Last Friday, she officially locked the delegates needed to be declared the party’s standard bearer.
She is expected to name her pick for vice president this week.
