Republican senator appears to mock Kamala Harris’s name at rally

Republican US Senator David Perdue appeared to mock Kamala Harris at a rally for President Donald Trump in the battleground state of Georgia on Friday, repeatedly mispronouncing the vice-presidential nominee’s name.

Harris, a US senator from California, is the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica.

Former vice-president Joe Biden named Harris as his running mate in August, making her the first black woman and first Asian American to join a major party’s presidential ticket.

She has said her name should be pronounced “commala”.

Perdue, who is in a closely-fought battle for re-election to the senate against Democrat Jon Ossoff, spoke ahead of Trump in the central Georgia city of Macon on Friday evening.

Video of his speech shows Perdue repeatedly making exaggerated attempts to pronounce the name before saying: “I don’t know, whatever.” The crowd responds with laughter.

Ossoff tweeted that Perdue would not have mocked a fellow senator who was male or white.

Sabrina Singh, a spokeswoman for the Democrat, took to Twitter on Friday to respond: “Well, that is incredibly racist.”

“He knows her name. There are only 100 of us,” Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic senator from Minnesota, said on Twitter yesterday.

John Burke, a spokesman for Perdue’s campaign, tweeted that the Republican senator “simply mispronounced Senator Harris’s name, and he didn’t mean anything by it”.

Perdue Foods, one of America’s largest chicken producers, distanced itself from the senator.

“I can assure you that David Perdue has no affiliation with the Perdue brand,” the company posted on Twitter.