CNN anchor Michael Smerconish called black men who felt Kamala Harris wasn’t really black “low-information voters.”
During Your Saturday showSmerconish played a clip from CBS affiliate WHP filmed at a central Pennsylvania barbershop late last month in which black men were asked what they thought about the vice president.
In the clip, a local reporter was talking to black men at a barbershop when some said they didn’t believe Harris was black.
But Smerconish was quick to correct them with a derogatory label.
“When I played that audio on my SiriusXM radio show on Thursday, many callers who identified themselves as African American were quick to tell me that these men were the exception, not the rule,” Smerconish said.
‘Some describe them as uninformed voters, not unlike those you’d find among whites.’
CNN anchor Michael Smerconish said people are calling black men who spoke out about Kamala Harris’ race “poorly informed voters.”
A local news station asked men at a barbershop in central Pennsylvania what they thought of the vice president, taken before Trump’s comments about her race.
Harris was born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, and last week Donald Trump suggested that she had only relatively recently become more black.
Left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald, who frequently denounces liberal hypocrisy, was among those who accused Smerconish of pompous behavior.
‘Among the many funny parts of this CNN video is that after the black men explain their views on Kamala and race, the White Man of Authority calls them stupid and says that’s not how most black people think, which he knows because his black friends told him so. Greenwald published in X.
Smerconish himself is a former Republican who has been an independent voter since 2010. He recently said Harris has questions to answer about his ultra-liberal record as she tries to pivot to the center for her presidential campaign.
The segment was played after Donald Trump’s decision to question Kamala Harris’ racial identity at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago on Wednesday.
Trump said he “didn’t know” Harris was black and thought she was “Indian through and through.” He also said Harris “turned black” to appeal to black voters, a line that reportedly raised eyebrows in his own campaign.
The clip begins with the local reporter asking: “Will Kamala make it a little more or less likely for you to vote Democrat?”
A man wearing a black shirt responded: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Is Kamala black, yes or no?”
“I’ll let her talk about it, but not me,” a second man said.
The man in the black shirt repeated the question to the man wearing a blue hat sitting next to him and another man wearing a Marvel t-shirt sitting on the other side.
“I share that same opinion,” said the man in the blue hat.
“I heard yes. I heard she’s half black and half Asian,” the man in the Marvel T-shirt said.
Several of the men said they don’t feel that Kamala Harris is black.
Others said they had heard she is half black and half Asian.
Trump reportedly ‘upset and upset’ because Harris has if she had stolen the spotlight from the campaign and was thinking that she was inauthentic in the way she presented her race.
Harris is the first Black, female and South Asian vice president, but Trump suggested at the Chicago conference that her embrace of Black culture was disingenuous.
His mother was Indian, while his father is Jamaican.
He said: ‘She always had Indian heritage and she was just promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a few years ago when she became black, and now she wants to be known as black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?’
“And you know what, I respect either of them, but she obviously doesn’t. Because she was Indian through and through and all of a sudden she turned around and became a black person. I think someone should look into that.”
Trump said he ‘didn’t know’ Harris was black and thought she was ‘Indian all the way’ at the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago
Trump then doubled down on Truth Social by saying, “Crazy Kamala is saying she is Indian, not black. This is a huge problem. A complete farce. She uses everyone, including their racial identity!”
At a rally in Atlanta on Saturday, the former president hurled another insult at him, suggesting he can’t pronounce his own name and has a “low IQ.”
Trump has been making an intense effort to secure black votes and has had some success.
Black business owners in Atlanta said they felt more empathy for Trump now that he has been criminally prosecuted.
A Daily Show correspondent was shocked when he gathered a group of black voters and half of them revealed they were willing to cast their ballots for the former president.
