Trump confidant and far-right agitator Laura Loomer has claimed that she’s “blacker” than Vice President Kamala Harris.
Loomer joins the growing number of conservatives, including former president Donald Trump, who have questioned the vice president’s race. Harris’s mother was Indian and her father is Jamaican. The Democratic presidential nominee has long talked about being Black in America and what her race means to her.
On October 18, Loomer appeared on Rumble on her program Loomer Unleashed, during which she claimed that Harris had “rolled out more of her fake accents.”
“I mean, she might as well just start talking about fried chicken and watermelon because her policies and her outreach to Black Americans is, is very offensive,” she added, according to Media Matters. “I’m not Black, obviously. I’m not going to pretend to be Black like Kamala Harris does, although I will say I’m blacker than Kamala Harris.”
“How much more is she going to pander to Black people?” Loomer asked. “‘I’m gonna legalize weed.’ Does she think that all Black people smoke marijuana? Does she think all Black men are drug addicts?”
In July, in front of the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump questioned Harris’s Black heritage.
“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, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” he said at the time.
“I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went, she became a Black person,” he added. “I think somebody should look into that too.”
Appearing on The Breakfast Club in 2019, Harris said: “I’m Black, and I’m proud of being Black, and I was born Black, I will die Black.”
Like Loomer, Peter Doocy of Fox News has also questioned Harris’s way of speaking.
“Since when does the vice president have what sounds like a southern accent?” he asked during a White House press briefing earlier this year.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. “…The question is just insane.”
Jesse Watters, also of Fox News, previously said that “Kamala was raised by an Indian mother in Canada, but now she sounds like Fani Willis,” in reference to the Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney, a Black woman.
Nathalie Baptiste of HuffPost noted in early September that “What Harris is doing on the campaign trail is called code-switching: the practice of changing your tone and syntax depending on your audience.”
She added: “It’s not a new phenomenon and is not just for politicians. Black people and other marginalized groups often code-switch in order to connect culturally with their own communities.”
Loomer appeared to go too far even for some hard-right Republicans last month when she attacked Harris’s Indian heritage with a racist post on X, drawing criticism from Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, among others.
Loomer is a 9/11 conspiracy theorist but was still invited by Trump to attend the 9/11 memorials in New York and Pennsylvania last month. She has also rejected allegations that she has had an affair with Trump, who has attempted to distance himself from her, writing on Truth Social that their views do not align.
