It was a topic that seemed destined for a full-throated argument during Tuesday night’s debate: race.

Moderator David Muir asked Donald Trump about his controversial comments about Vice President Kamala Harris in July, when he said at a National Association of Black Journalists convention that he did not “know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black. ... So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

The remarks drew outrage at the time, and in response to hearing them repeated by Muir, Trump said, “I don’t care what she is. ... Whatever she wants to be is OK with me.” Yet he raised the issue again, saying that he had read that she was not Black and then, later, that she was Black.

Harris, who is Black and Indian American, said that Trump has “consistently over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people.”

She cited several examples of Trump’s controversial actions in the arena of race, including his “birther” lies that questioned Barack Obama’s birthplace, the alleged racial discrimination at Trump’s housing developments, and his support for the death penalty for the defendants in the 1989 “Central Park Five” case, who were later exonerated.

The vice president said that Americans did not want an approach that was “constantly trying to divide us.”

“We see in each other a friend, a neighbor,” said Harris, adding that she regularly meets with people who said they want a national discourse that focuses on the “dreams of the American people,” and not race.

In response, Trump defended his stance on the Central Park Five and pivoted to a discussion of economics, saying: “I built one of the greatest economies in the history of the world.”

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