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A CNN panel devolved into a shouting match on Thursday after a GOP representative refused to pronounce Kamala Harris’s name correctly.
The panel featured Republican Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina. She was joined by several other commentators, including Democratic strategist Keith Boykin and Vanderbilt University professor Michael Dyson
The conversation began with Mace pronouncing Harris’s first name correctly, before quickly correcting herself to the wrong pronunciation.
“You had it right, you almost got it,” Boykin responded.
That’s when Mace refused to correct herself: “I will say Kamala’s name any way that I want to.”
The correct pronunciation of Harris’s first name — “comma-lah,” not “cam-el-uh” or ”kuh-mal-uh” — is no secret. She even released an instructional video in 2016 during her senate campaign.
The panel devolved into several members talking over each other before Boykin was able to speak through the chaos: “If I purposely mispronounced your name, that would probably not be appropriate.”
The conversation was dropped but brought up again a few minutes later.
“This congresswoman is a wonderful human being,” Dyson added. “But when you disrespect Kamala Harris by saying you will call her whatever you want, I know you don’t intend it to be that way, that’s the history and legacy of white disregard for the humanity of Black people.”
Mace then accused Dyson of calling her “a racist.”
“I just said you weren’t a racist,” Dyson replied. “No, you don’t have to intend racism to accomplish it. Your disrespect of Kamala Harris is part and parcel of a tradition.”
The panel then turned into a shouting match. When Mace once again mispronounced the vice president’s name, several panelists shouted the correct pronunciation back.
“It’s Kamala, you’re doing this on purpose, congresswoman,” Boykin said.
“You’re a white woman disrespecting a Black woman,” Dyson added.
Later in the panel, the conversation turned to Donald Trump’s comments that Harris “happened to turn Black.” When asked if he should stop using this rhetoric, Mace didn’t give a clear answer.
“I didn’t hear him say it, I didn’t hear what he said about her race, I’m not going to weigh in on her race,” Mace said.
The panel moderator further pushed Mace: “He said that she turned Black, he questioned whether she was really Black. I don’t think that’s that hard to say, ‘That’s out of bounds.’ Can you say that?”
“I didn’t say it,” Mace repsonded, as another panelist shouted: “Just say yes.”
Mace, who criticized Donald Trump before throwing her support behind him, isn’t the only GOP politician to disregard the correct way to say Harris’s name.
“By the way, there are numerous ways of saying her name, they were explaining to me, ‘you can say Kamala, you can say Kamala’, I said, ‘don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter what I say. I couldn’t care less if I mispronounce it’,” Trump said. “Some people think I mispronounce it on purpose, but actually, I’ve heard it said about seven different ways.”
Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, was quick to respond to the former president’s remarks.
“I know you have so much trouble pronouncing her name,” Emhoff said during a fundraising event. “But here’s the good news: After the election, you can just call her Madam President.”
