Vice President Harris says she doesn't think America is a racist country

Vice President Kamala Harris said Thursday that she does not believe America to be a racist nation, but that we as a country need to study the history of racism and its impact.

"I don’t think America is a racist country." Harris said on ABC-TV's "Good Morning America," while also saying Americans must "speak truth about the history of racism in our country."

The vice president's comments follow South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott's response to President Biden's address Wednesday night to a joint session of Congress in which the senator said the country at its core is not racist and that it is wrong for Democrats to use the past to shut down debate.

"It's backwards to fight discrimination with different discrimination," Scott said. "And it's wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present."

In her interview, Harris, the country's first black vice president, warned that glossing over or ignoring racial issues does not help the country unify and heal from past injustices.

"These are issues that we must confront, and it doesn’t help to heal our country, to unify us as a people, to ignore the realities of that," she said.