The racist mud-slinging toward Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has officially begun, but it's coming from a perhaps unexpected source.
Black Voices for Trump co-chair Stacy Washington, herself a Black woman, suggested to Fox News on Wednesday that Senator Harris is not Black enough to fit the bill of a historic vice presidential nominee.
The comments came during an appearance on Fox & Friends in which Washington impugned Harris's racial and ethnic heritage.
Fox News guest suggests Kamala Harris isn't Black enoughyoutu.be
In her appearance, Washington made claims about Kamala Harris's ancestry.
"[Harris] has really played up this idea that she's a traditional Black American like myself and so many others who count ourselves among the millions of Black people who are descended from slaves. But she's not descended from slaves. She's descended from slave owners."
This is a popular and oft-repeated claim against Harris in right-wing media circles because of an article Harris's father, who is Jamaican, wrote that discusses his family's lineage descending in part from an 18th-century Irish plantation and slave owner, Hamilton Brown.
But it is not at all uncommon for Black people to be descended from both slaves and slave owners, as children conceived between slaves and plantation owners, often via rape, was a common practice at the time.
That simple fact did not stop Washington from taking her claim about Harris even further.
" Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris because she's a Black woman but to most Black Americans, she's not. She's not black like me..."
And while Washington did concede that Harris is part of the "Black experience of America," she called Biden's choice of Harris "pandering."
"I think it's kind of a sad day that we have this historic moment but we have to attribute it to someone pandering for votes."
On Twitter, people were not at all impressed by Washington's attempt to erase Harris's identity.
Washington went on to criticize Harris and Biden's "tax and spend, big government" policy proposals as bad for Black Americans because they will destroy the economy, which has already contracted by 32.9% in 2020, the worst contraction in American history.
