(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) In an attempt to pander to black Americans, Vice President Kamala Harris, the current Democrat presidential candidate, posted a video clip over the weekend from her recent stop in Savannah, Ga., during which she claimed be an expert in soul food.
Kamala Harris inspired me to make collard greens. Share your best recipe! pic.twitter.com/qYWGxNCNkO
— @amuse (@amuse) September 2, 2024
“I have a friend who had a Christmas Party, Christmas Eve every year, and she asked me to make the greens for her every year,” Harris claimed during a visit to the historic city downtown area.
“And I am not lying to you that I would make so many greens that I’d need to wash them in the bathtub,” she added. “I’m telling you the truth!”
For Southern black families, it is a time-honored tradition to spend the weekend cooking up a whole mess of collard greens in a large batch due to the time-intensive process of soaking them and their tendency to cook down into a smaller portion.
The leafy vegetables—along with the turnip and mustard varieties, kale and spinach—flourished in the hot weather and were cultivated by slaves, who were sometimes allowed to maintain a private vegetable garden on large plantations to feed their families.
Harris—who was born in Berkeley, Calif., and brought up in Canada by her Indian mother—was then asked how she prepared her greens.
At what point do you add the curry?
— Krugger Duning (@dinoridinjesus) September 1, 2024
Harris claimed she let her spices, bacon and stock boil for a couple of hours before adding collard greens and allowing them to cook for a few hours.
However, she then elicited controversy by admitting that she “cheated” by adding Tabasco sauce at the end to give them an extra “tang.”
“I cheat and do a little Tabasco … I mean, I like Louisiana [brand] hot sauce, but Tabasco has that right amount of vinegar,” Harris claimed.
Ain't no Black people cooking greens with Tabasco sauce. 🙆🏾♂️🙅🏾♂️🤦🏾♂️ Cooking them with Tabasco sauce? Not only are you not Black and keep trying to play like you are now they're trying to say your African American as if the first insult wasn't bad enough. Pandering nonsense.
— Marcus4Rochester (@Marcus4Roc) September 1, 2024
Despite the skepticism some social-media users expressed over her recipe’s authenticity, others praised Harris for actually giving a detailed answer to a question.
this is the most detailed policy we’ve heard yet
— Trips Captain ✨ (@tripcapt) September 1, 2024
The candid exchange stood in stark contrast with Harris’s only sit-down interview since becoming the Democratic nominee.
During the interview Thursday with CNN’s Dana Bash, which also took place in Savannah, Harris wormed her way out of several questions and even directly refused to answer one about former President Donald Trump, the current GOP nominee, questioning the half-Jamaican Harris’s claim to African–American heritage.
DANA: Trump suggested you happened to turn black recently for political purposes..
KAMALA: "Next question, please." pic.twitter.com/kb9niY58oj
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 30, 2024
“[Trump] suggested that you ‘happened to turn black’ recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity,” said Bash, before pausing to allow Harris to comment.
Harris paused for a moment before insisting that Trump used the “same old, tired playbook” against her and immediately requested to move on to the next question, laughing awkwardly.
Harris’s history of concocting wordy, meaningless non-answers to questions backfired in the interview, especially as she refused to solidly commit to any consistent policy positions and acknowledged that the radical views expressed during her 2019 primary run had not changed.
While her astroturfed, style-over-substance campaign following the Joe Biden bait-and-switch may, in many ways, be unprecedentedfor American politics, Harris’s shameless embrace of black stereotypes follows a tradition that dates back to presidential precursors including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Several people have compared Hariss’s so-called code-switching to when failed 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton claimed to carry hot sauce in her purse during a radio interview with Charlamagne tha God.
The Hillary Clinton Hot Sauce Incident. (2016) pic.twitter.com/n8y5fNqObp
— crazy ass moments in american politics (@ampol_moment) June 26, 2022
Her dramatic change of accents has also received notice on social media.
Kamala Harris sounds like two different people at her rallies pic.twitter.com/2fdMzO5gM9
— New York Post (@nypost) September 3, 2024
Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy even grilled White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre over the bizarre dialect—although the Biden administration’s top propagandist insisted she hadn’t noticed anything.
This is gold
Doocy: Since when does the Vice President have what sounds like a Southern accent?
KJP: I have no idea what you're talking about. Do you think Americans care about this? pic.twitter.com/MaWN3PwO5e
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) September 3, 2024
Most recently, Harris shed the Southern drawl and revealed her new urban accent while discussing labor unions in Detroit over the weekend.
“Ya betta thank a union memba for sick leave!” Harris yelled. “You betta thank a union memba for paid leave! You betta thank a union memba for vacation time!”
BREAKING: Kamala Harris unveils a new urban accent in Detroit pic.twitter.com/JS4VCP8cBj
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 2, 2024
Some expressed optimism that Harris’s outreach efforts could make her the most fluent non-native “jive” speaker since June Cleaver.
I must apologize. I never realized Kamala Harris has ALWAYS sounded like this. It wasn't an accent LOLpic.twitter.com/gTF9YP5yVP
— Shawn Farash (@Shawn_Farash) September 3, 2024
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
