Social media users recently shared a 2019 report with a quote falsely attributed to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, where she believes white people are racist. The vice president’s press secretary confirmed to Reuters that the quote was fabricated, and Reuters found no evidence that she ever made that remark.
The report quotes Kamala Harris as saying, “If he is white, he will be racist.” Add the comment: ‘Is the statement racist?’ (here). Examples of the post shared in February 2021 can be seen here, here and here.
Vice President Sabrina Singh, deputy press secretary, told Reuters in an email that Harris never said that.
Reuters could not find any evidence of these remarks on Harris’s social media channels, in ProPublica’s “Politwoops” archive, which traces deleted tweets by politicians (here), in any media reports, nor on the White House website that made statements, releases, speeches and remarks made by Harris and the Biden Administration (here).
The quote may have come from a 2018 Vanity Fair article titled, ” He’s still going to be racist if it’s a white nominee ‘: Can Kamala Harris, non-identity politician, find her way into an identity politician? moment? “visible here.
The article explains that the quote in the headline was not said by Harris, but by Jeremy Bird, who in 2012 was Barack Obama’s national field director of campaigning. The full Bird quote reads: ‘It would be a real disgrace for the country for Democrats to run on this false idea that we should nominate a white candidate because Donald Trump is racist. He’s still going to be racist if it’s a white nominee. You saw it in 2016. ”
Harris is the first black American, first Asian American and first female vice president (here). In 2019, Harris was asked by Newsweek how she did not have a hatred towards white people after an incident in her childhood where a white friend said she could not play with Harris because she was black. Harris said: “Most Americans do not behave like that and most parents do not behave like that, so it was not necessary to create a broad application because of the one experience. But we can not deny that there are many children, black children in America, who have had the experience. ”(Here)
Harris joined and expressed her public support for peaceful anti-racist protests that took place in the US and the world after the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 (here, here, here).
Reuters has uncovered other statements falsely attributed to Harris, as visible here, here, here and here.
VERDICT
Untrue. This quote is not from Kamala Harris and probably stemmed from a misinterpretation of the headline of an article by Vanity Fair quoting someone else.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.