Amid Black Mold Battle, Janet Jackson Questions Kamala Harris’s Race

Musician, actor, and style icon Janet Jackson has been open about her views in recent years, with her 2017 State of the World tour beginning with a video statement of her politics. “We will not be silent. LGBTQ rights. Peace not war. Black Lives Matter. Immigrants are welcome. Liberty and justice for all,” the screens at tour stadiums read. “Prejudice: No! Ignorance: No! Bigotry: No! Illiteracy: No!” the message continued.

Those values were at odds with the messages presented by then-president Donald Trump, whose own values appear to have grown even further from those tenets during his current campaign to retake the White House. It appears that Jackson’s values might also have shifted, at least when it came to her list of non-negotiables.

The 58-year-old singer’s 1986 song, “Nasty,” received an ironic bump in 2016 when Trump used that word against Democratic contender Hillary Clinton during that election cycle’s presidential debate. That was a politics-meets-pop-culture moment that almost seems quaint now, given Trump’s reported fondness, these days, for referring to his Democratic opponent, vice-president Kamala Harris, as a “bitch.” (Sadly for “Bitch” singer Meredith Brooks, the American public seems less inclined to view Trump’s insults as a silly joke this time around.)

Janet Jackson fans will likely be relieved to learn that the megastar didn’t use language that harsh to describe Harris. But her framing of a possible Harris presidency wasn’t terribly supportive, either. In an interview published Saturday by the Guardian, the “Pleasure Principle” singer perpetuated one of the most ignorant falsehoods presented during this Idiocracy-leaning presidential election: the lie that Harris has been deceptive about her race.

It’s clear from reading the conversation that even reporter Nosheen Iqbal was nonplussed. According to the journalist (who also hosts the Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast), she only asked Jackson about Harris due to the social justice messages Jackson has presented in work going back to her groundbreaking Rhythm Nation album in 1989. “Well, you know what they supposedly said?” Jackson responded. “She’s not black. That’s what I heard. That she’s Indian.”

It’s a claim that echoes the one first made by Trump in July, when he participated in an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists. At that event, Trump said of Harris that “She was always of Indian heritage and she was only promoting Indian heritage.”

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump falsely continued regarding the vice-president, who has never concealed her identity as the daughter of Donald J. Harris, her Black, Jamaican American father, and mother Shyamala Gopalan, who came to the U.S. from India in 1958.

“So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump continued from the NABJ stage in July. “She was Indian all the way, and all of a sudden, she made a turn and she became a Black person.”

Though nearly every journalistic outlet fact-checked Trump’s remarks that day, it appears that the message didn’t reach Jackson, who actually expanded on Trump’s falsehoods when speaking with Iqbal. “Her father’s white. That’s what I was told. I mean, I haven’t watched the news in a few days,” Jackson said when Iqbal corrected her. “I was told that they discovered her father was white.”

It’s unclear who the “they” is that Jackson referred to, nor did she cite a source for the false claim about Harris’s father. Representatives for Jackson have not responded to Vanity Fair’s request for clarification.

As Iqbal wrote, “The people who are most vocal in questioning the facts of Harris’s identity tend to be hardcore QAnon-adjacent, Trump-loving conspiracy theorists,” but as she doesn’t “think Jackson falls into that camp,” one has to “wonder what the algorithms are serving her.” But just hours after the Guardian interview was published, Jackson returned to the headlines for another reason: her penthouse apartment is allegedly infested with black mold, a fungal growth that experts say can cause neurological issues including memory loss, confusion, and cognitive impairments.

According to the Daily Mail, Jackson recently moved out of her $26,000/month residence in London’s Chelsea Barracks after finding the toxic substance, after living in the flat “for several years.” The Mail reports that she’s now mulling a return to America, which is surprising given what else she had to say about the aftermath of the upcoming election. “I think either way it goes is going to be mayhem,” Jackson said, then repeated herself. “I think there might be mayhem either way it goes. But we’ll have to see.”