CLAIM: Tiger Woods said Kamala’s “fake black accent is embarrassing and extremely offensive”
A September 4 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) features side-by-side images of professional golfer Tiger Woods and Vice President Kamala Harris, with a quote purportedly from Woods above it. “Kamala’s fake black accent is embarrassing and extremely offensive,” Woods’ statement read.
The post has been shared more than 8,000 times in two days. There were similar posts on Instagram and in threads.
The statement came from a satirical social media account. There are no credible reports to corroborate the post’s assertion that Woods made the statements, and there is no evidence of the statements on his social media accounts.
There is no evidence that Woods made the statements attributed to him in the post. It doesn’t appear anywhere on his website or social media accounts, nor was it mentioned on any of the PGA Tour’s social media accounts. No credible news outlets have reported Woods as making such comments.
The claim comes from a satirical account on Twitter, formerly known as X, called @PGATUOR, a misspelling of PGA TOUR. X’s account profile contains the hashtags “#Satire” and “#Parody.” The original September. The two posts attributing Harris’ remarks to Woods appear to have been removed, but the account name still appears on some versions of the post.
The post is an example of what’s known as “stolen satire,” where something written as satire and originally presented as satire is published as if it were real news. As a result, readers of Nisei posts are misled, as in this case.
The allegations about Harris’ “accent” came after former President Donald Trump’s campaign asked social media users to “tell the difference” between two videos of Harris uttering similar phrases during campaign speeches, suggesting she was fabricating an accent to attract black voters. Trump himself has previously questioned Harris’ racial identity. During a Nov. 3 press conference, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dismissed a question from Fox News senior correspondent Peter Doocy about Harris’ “sounding Southern accent at times.”
“Do you think Americans seriously think this is an important issue?” Jean-Pierre asked. “They care — you know what they care about? They care about the economy. They care about cutting costs. “They care about health care. That’s what Americans care about.”
Woods doesn’t often comment publicly on politics, but he has played golf with Trump at least twice during his presidency and once during his presidency, The New York Times reported. In 2019, Trump awarded Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Woods also played with former presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush during his time in office, USA TODAY previously reported.
