A group of black male voters in Pennsylvania told a local reporter they had not considered Vice President Kamala Harris to be black ahead of former President Trump’s remarks on her race during an on-stage interview at a conference of black journalists last week.
On Saturday, CNN host Michael Smerconish aired a clip of local CBS news affiliate reporter Joel D. Smith interviewing potential black voters at a barbershop last week about their views on Harris.
“Is Kamala gonna make you a little more likely or less likely to vote Democrat?” Smith asked the men. Before answering the question, one of the men looked at the barber and asked, “Greg, hold on Greg. Is Kamala Black, yes or no?”
“I’m gonna let her speak on that, but to me, no,” he responded.
He then turned to others 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.”
During his show, Smerconish noted that he had aired an audio version of the clip on his radio program Thursday and received feedback indicating that those men did not reflect the views of the broader black community.
Last week, Trump said: “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?”
Fox News’ Harris Faulkner, who attended the event, heaped Trump with praise on Thursday for wading into a “racial storm” at the National Association of Black Journalists conference.
Faulkner, who co-moderated a panel conversation with Trump on Wednesday, took a different stance than some have in the mainstream media.
“I’m watching that back and I’m seeing that we were able to, at some points, the former president and I, have a conversation. So much of what America is focused on today and so much of what that started with, with all that emotion and the gotcha moments from the interviewer who was seated directly to his left has really overtaken the fact that we had a an opportunity to talk with a president who walked into a racial storm yesterday,” Faulkner said during an appearance on Fox & Friends.
The other interviewer Faulkner mentioned, Rachel Scott of ABC News, opened the session with a question that Trump described as “very nasty.”
“There were journalists, activists, whatever you want to call people who let their politics show, who wanted the NABJ to rescind its offer to have the 45th president of the United States come and sit,” added Faulkner.
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“They had also invited Joe Biden, and he had said yes, but he’s not on the ticket anymore. They’ve also invited Kamala Harris. Finally yesterday, after some reported back and forth about her schedule, so on and so forth, she’ll do something via satellite. And I know she’s attending Representative Sheila Jackson Lee’s funeral today, but NABJ is several days, it’s five days Wednesday through Sunday. So, that has been worked out,” Faulkner added.
She continued:
But all of that I say because there were protesters who were forecast to come, and then the internal stuff that was going on, he walks out on stage and not a greeting to acknowledge it’s been 18 days at that point since you survived an assassination attempt.
And I’m glad you guys played a clip of that, because America and the journalists in the room who, by the way, sat and listened, some were laughing along with the president, little jokes and quips he was making, there were some critical in the audience, too. But it was expressed respectively or respectfully, rather. There was a way to have taken some of the energy out of that moment, though, with that reporter. And what I would say to anyone who’s going to be discussing race while the Left is playing the race card mightily, take the air out of the balloon a little bit and let things cool down by saying, “Look, I’m willing to discuss anything with you, but if you show me disrespect, if we can’t have mutual respect, then it’s up to you if you want me to get up and leave, it’s all on you. You’ve got to control.” And boom, take it down.
