Nedra Rhone: Trump says he doesn't care about race, but he keeps talking about it

Much of Tuesday’s presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump proved to be well-trodden ground. The sound bites and talking points, at times rambling and incoherent (Trump) or rational yet repetitive (Harris), were largely what we have heard before.

But when David Muir, one of the two ABC News anchors moderating the debate, asked Trump about his comments related to Harris’ racial identity, it felt somewhat illuminating.

Citing Trump’s quote from July, “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,” Muir asked the former president why he believed it was appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of his opponent.

“I don’t and I don’t care. I don’t care what she is. I don’t care,” Trump said.

He suggested that Muir or some Americans were making a big deal out of something that he “couldn’t care less” about. With that response, Trump both condemned his own actions and diminished the importance of his words.

It reminded me of childhood arguments when a bully’s verbal put-downs backfire and the only clapback he or she can come up with is: “I don’t care.”

But Trump does care about race, at least when it creates a perceived advantage for him.

If he didn’t care, he wouldn’t have issued an executive order in 2020 that banned federal entities and contractors from providing employee training on so-called divisive concepts and harmful ideologies related to race and gender.

As Harris stated in her response, Trump’s focus on race has been a fixture of his career.

It was there in the late 1960s when Trump began working for his father’s real estate company, which would later be investigated for racial bias by the U.S. Department of Justice.

It was there in 1989, when Trump took out advertisements in four New York City newspapers calling for the execution the Central Park 5, the group of Black and Latino boys who were wrongfully accused of rape.

It was there in the years 2011 through 2014 when Trump continued to falsely insist that President Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen.

Harris outlined a timeline in which Trump has drawn on race and racial stereotypes to influence and manipulate the American people.

If that’s not enough, PBS painstakingly documented what Trump has said about race from 1973 through 2020. Sometimes his record is conflicting, but any contradictions that might seem to reflect evolved thinking about race generally resulted in some type of personal gain.

It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of race and politics — these are ties that run deep in America. But what Trump showed in Tuesday’s debate is the bigger picture: a persistent and deeply entrenched view of race in this country that is stuck on stupid.

We need to talk about race but we need to talk about it in ways that are productive toward bringing much needed change: addressing systemic racism, the legacy of slavery, racial and gender discrimination, economic and racial segregation.

That’s not the same as promoting racial stereotypes or questioning someone’s biracial identity.

It is a long-standing tradition in American politics to demonize one group of people in order to retain power. It is a standard play in the political playbook to appeal to the “common man” while offering up marginalized people — in this case, immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities and women — for ridicule or branding as the evil element destroying the country.

Trump’s rebuttal, that Harris had to reach “many, many years” into history to find evidence of his racial recklessness, only served to underscore Harris’ point that it has been there all along.

Trump claimed there is nothing to see there now, but in the span of the two-hour debate he repeated baseless claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats and dogs, “the pets of the people that live there,” he said.

Muir quickly debunked this lie but once again Trump had tossed out a comment that marked Black and brown people as savage and inhuman.

Trump says he doesn’t care about race, but it would seem he cares very much.

If he didn’t, he wouldn’t keep talking about it in all the wrong ways.