By Sarakshi Rai - 08/01/24

Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) criticized former President Trump’s comments questioning Vice President Harris’s biracial heritage, saying “we need to fiercely call out this type of bigotry and ignorance.”

Frost pointed to his own primary race, adding that “some folks said similar things about me.”

“That I wasn’t actually Black cause my mom is Cuban. Or that I’m not actually Latino because I’m Black,” he said in a post on the social platform X.

Trump in a Thursday post on Truth Social shared a picture of Harris on a family vacation to India. The image was first shared during the 2020 presidential race as well as in the months after when Harris was announced as President Biden’s running mate.

“Thank you Kamala for the nice picture you sent from many years ago! Your warmth, friendship, and love of your Indian Heritage are very much appreciated,” he said in a post.

The post represented a doubling down of remarks he made a day earlier during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention, when he said the likely Democratic nominee was “always of Indian heritage” and then “happened to turn Black.”

Harris is the first Black and South Asian woman to serve in the country’s second-highest office. While Harris was born in California, her late mother was born in India and her father is from Jamaica.

Frost has previously spoken about his multiracial upbringing. His parents — a Cuban American woman and a white man from Kansas — adopted him at birth. His biological parents were a Lebanese Puerto Rican woman and a Haitian man.

He has previously defended Harris after GOP claims that she’s a “DEI hire,” saying that is a cover-up for a racial slur and among “racist dog whistles” being used against her.

“Whenever you hear DEI, I want you to think about the N-word. I want you to think about racial slurs. That’s what they actually mean,” Frost said during a CNN interview in July.