Donald Trump persisted in questioning Kamala Harris’s ethnicity during Tuesday night’s presidential debate, refusing to acknowledge his previous remarks about her identity.

When moderator David Muir asked him why he felt it appropriate to comment on Harris’s background, Trump said, “I don’t care what it is.”

“Whatever she wants to be is fine with me,” Trump said. When Muir alluded to Trump’s comments last month claiming Harris “went black” for political reasons, Trump said, “I don’t know.”

“All I can say is that I read that she wasn’t black when she posted that. I can say that. And then I read that she was black, and that’s fine. Both were fine with me.”

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

“She was just promoting Native American heritage,” he said at the time. “I didn’t know she was black until a few years ago when she happened to be 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 racial issues that she called “tragic.” She emphasized that Trump discriminated against black people who wanted to live in one of his father’s buildings. And she rebuked him for calling for the death penalty for the Exonerated Five, formerly known as the Central Park Five.

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

In 1989, Trump took out a full-page ad in New York newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty for four black and one Latino teenagers who had been falsely accused of raping a jogger in Central Park. Their convictions were overturned, but Trump has not apologized and has consistently refused to retract his comments, claiming that they had admitted their guilt.

He continued his opposition throughout the debate.

“They admitted, they said they pleaded guilty, and I said, ‘Well, if they pleaded guilty, then they seriously injured a human being – ultimately killed a human being,'” 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 settlement. One of the men, Yusef Salaam, now a member of the New York City Council, condemned Trump’s comments during the recent Democratic National Convention.

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

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

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