The US artist Glenn Ligon has waded in to a row over Kamala Harris’s ancestral heritage, taking a swipe at the singer Janet Jackson. In a recent interview with the Guardian, the sister of Michael Jackson repeated a false claim made by the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that Harris is not Black. In reality, the Democratic nominee was born to Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian cancer researcher, and Donald Harris, an economics professor from Jamaica, in 1964. She attended Howard University, which is historically Black.
“She’s not Black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian,” Jackson said, admitting that although she hadn’t “watched the news in a few days,” she was told somebody had “discovered [Harris’s] father was white.” The interviewer said she was “floored”—and so was Ligon who recently posted on Instagram: “Sorry Miss Jackson… what you said about Kamala… that’s just nasty.” Ligon, who has curated a new show at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, refers of course to Janet’s hit 1986 song.