Donald Trump raised further questions about Kamala Harris’ race during Tuesday night’s presidential debate and refused to acknowledge his previous statements about her identity.

Trump said, “I don’t care what she is” when asked by host David Muir why he felt it was appropriate to comment on Harris’s race.

“Whatever she wants to be, I’m fine with it,” Trump said. When Muir referred to Trump’s comments last month in which he claimed Harris was “going black” for political gain, Trump said, “I don’t know.”

“All I can say is I read that she wasn’t black and she did that. That’s what I’m saying. And then I read that she was black, and that’s okay. Both were okay with me.”

Trump made the first comments during an interview at the National Association of Black Journalists convention.

“She was just promoting her Indian heritage,” he said at the time. “I didn’t know she was black until a few years ago, when she happened to become black, and now she wants to be known as black.”

“Is she Indian or is she black?” he asked.

She is both. Harris’ mother was Indian and her father is Jamaican.

In response, Harris said Tuesday that Trump has a divisive history on race, which she described as “tragic.” She highlighted that Trump discriminated against black people who wanted to live in one of his father’s buildings. And she blasted him for calling for the “Exonerated Five,” formerly known as the “Central Park Five,” to be sentenced to death.

“I think the American people want better than that, want better than this,” Harris said.

In 1989, Trump took out a full-page ad in New York City newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty for four black teenagers and a Hispanic teenager who were wrongly accused of raping a jogger in Central Park. Their convictions were overturned, but Trump has not apologized and has consistently refused to recant, arguing that they had pleaded guilty.

He continued to refuse this throughout the debate.

“They admitted it, said they were guilty, and I said, ‘Well, if they are guilty, they seriously injured someone — ultimately killed someone,’” he said, adding that “a lot of people” agreed with his actions at the time.

Eventually, DNA evidence linked a serial rapist to the crime. But the teens spent years behind bars before their convictions were overturned in 2002. New York City later paid them $41 million in a legal settlement. One of the men, Yusef Salaam, now a New York City councilman, condemned Trump’s comments at the recent Democratic National Convention.

“Forty-Five wanted us unharmed,” he said, referring to Trump as the 45th president. “He wanted us dead. Today we were exonerated because the real perpetrator confessed and DNA proved it.

“The man says he still stands by the original guilty verdict,” Salaam said, referring to Trump.

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