Janet Jackson seemingly questioned Vice President Kamala Harris‘ race.
The singer-songwriter spoke to The Guardian for its Weekend podcast to discuss her ongoing Together Again tour, which is set to end in Glasgow, Scotland, on Oct. 13. During the conversation, the 2024 United States presidential election came up. When the reporter noted that America may be on the verge of voting for its first Black, female president, Jackson stopped her and shared her thoughts.
“Well, you know what they supposedly said?” Jackson asked. “She’s not Black, that’s what I heard, that she’s Indian.” She added, “Her father’s white, that’s what I was told. I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days. I was told that they discovered her father was white.”
The presidential nominee’s father, Donald J. Harris, is a Jamaican-American economist and professor at Standford University, who separated from her Indian mother when Harris and her sister, Maya, were young.
When asked again if she thought America was ready for a president who was a woman of color, Jackson admitted she wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t want to answer that because I really truthfully don’t know. I think either way it goes is going to be mayhem.”
Jackson’s comments about Harris’ race follow Donald Trump questioning if his opponent was actually a Black woman at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in July.
“She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage,” Trump said in Chicago. “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 continued, “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. I think somebody should look into that too.”
