Echoing well-trodden disinformation that has infected the U.S. presidential election, pop icon Janet Jackson said she has heard Vice President Kamala Harris is not Black.
The remarks were published Saturday by The Guardian, granted access and interview time as Jackson promotes her latest tour’s European stops. Jackson is also promoting a residency that starts in December at Resorts World Las Vegas.
Jackson’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday evening.
Because Jackson sang of wanting to “break the color lines” on the 1989 single “Rhythm Nation,” the interviewer said she was inspired to ask for Jackson’s view of Harris as a Black woman who could be the first to serve as U.S. president.
“Well, you know what they supposedly said?” Jackson is quoted as saying during the interview in her adopted hometown of London. “She’s not black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian.”
The author wrote that she responded with a correction, telling Jackson that Harris does have Indian heritage but is also Black.
“[Harris’] father’s white,” Jackson is quoted as saying. “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 vice president’s campaign did not immediately respond Saturday night to a request for comment on Jackson’s remarks.
In July, former President Donald Trump, who’s running against Harris in a battle to succeed President Joe Biden, said the vice president “turned Black” for political gain after previously “only promoting Indian heritage.”
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black,” Trump said at the National Association of Black Journalists 2024 Convention.
The same evening, Harris painted Trump’s remarks on her background as part of a strategy to turn Americans against each other for his benefit.
“It was the same old show — the divisiveness and the disrespect,” Harris said at an event in Houston. “And let me just say the American people deserve better.”
Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was born in southern India. Father Donald J. Harris, an economist and Stanford University professor emeritus, was born in Jamaica and is Black.
During the interview with The Guardian, Jackson also expressed a lack of hope regarding the presidential election.
“I think either way it goes is going to be mayhem,” Jackson is quoted as saying.
The singer also touched on the topic of child sex trafficking while responding to a question about the “Rhythm Nation” album, which she said was about “making a difference in a kid’s life, a teenager’s life.”
“There’s all this child trafficking crap that’s going on and sex trafficking crap, you know what I mean, that wasn’t so prevalent then?” she said, adding that sex trafficking is “really now out in the open, because it’s like a billion-dollar business and all that crap.”
The star survived an allegedly abusive father, Joe Jackson, who died in 2018. Brother Michael Jackson accused him of physical abuse, and sister LaToya once claimed he sexual abused her, though she later recanted.
Jackson is promoting tour dates, but she also may be embarking on a campaign to strengthen a legacy that may have been tarnished in the shadow of Michael’s pop kingship and shunned after Justin Timberlake exposed her nipple during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2004, The Guardian reported.
As it stands, she has amassed 10 No. 1 hits, 5 Grammy Awards, and an Academy Award nomination for best original song.