Fox News host Jesse Watters faced swift backlash on social media after his recent attacks on Vice President Kamala Harris.
During Tuesday’s broadcast of “Jesse Watters Primetime,” he accused Harris of using different accents, then introduced an edited clip that showed a compilation of Harris delivering speeches in Detroit and Pittsburgh on Monday.
“Kamala was raised by an Indian mother in Canada,” he said, misrepresenting the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee’s complete upbringing. “But now she sounds like Fani Willis.”
Harris, who identifies as both Black and Indian American, was born in Oakland, California. She wrote in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” that she spent the formative years of her childhood “living on the boundary between Oakland and Berkeley.”
The vice president moved to Montreal when she was 12, after her mother was recruited for a job in the Canadian city, according to The New York Times. After high school, she attended Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C.
People on X, formerly Twitter, slammed Watters for his attempt to compare Harris and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is also Black, as a line of attack. Willis had brought an indictment against Donald Trump over his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential vote in Georgia, but the case remains on hold pending appeals.
Social media users called him out for promoting racist attacks about dialects and Black culture, by mocking and comparing the way Willis and Harris speak.
“I don’t know who Watters and Fox News are targeting with their 1950 racist dog whistle because there isn’t any racist still left out there who isn’t already supporting Trump,” one X user tweeted.
“They can’t attack her on her education, her career, or her record so they’re going with straight up racism,” wrote another.
Keith Boykin, a White House aide…
Read the full article here
