Last week, in a moment at the National Association of Black Journalists convention that’s gone viral, former President Donald Trump challenged whether Harris is really Black. He said that he didn’t know that she’s Black until some years ago, “when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black.”
Two weeks ago, former Fox News personality Megyn Kelly wrote on X, falsely, that Harris, who previously served as a U.S. senator from California, the attorney general of California, and the district attorney of San Francisco, had to “sleep her way into and upwards in California politics” because she’s nothing more than “an unqualified political aspirant.”
And the conservative activist Tom Fitton recently made comments that suggest the birtherism ideology has returned. He suggested, erroneously, that since the Oakland native was born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, she’s ineligible to run for president.
Republican leaders have urged their colleagues and allies to avoid using racist and sexist language when they criticize Harris. Trump advisors recently told the Bulwark that their criticism of Harris’ record is unrelated to race. But a Trump advisor in that same article suggested that the campaign intends to use the “Willie Horton” strategy against Harris, referring to the George H.W. Bush ad from 1988. The Willie Horton ad was widely seen to have played upon white fears of crime.
Is Birtherism back?
In some ways, Harris is facing similar accusations that former President Barack Obama was confronted with during his 2008 bid for the White House.
The claim that Obama was born in Kenya, and as a result not constitutionally eligible to be president, stalked his campaign, in particular as he prepared to square off against U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona in the general election. Honolulu-born Obama attempted to scotch the gossip by publishing a copy of his short-form birth certificate. But official documentation didn’t put the conspiracy, known as birtherism, to rest. Rumors spread that the certificate was bogus.
In 2011, Trump breathed new life into the rumors on an episode of The View: “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” he asked. “I wish he would, because I think it’s a terrible pall that’s hanging over him. … There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.”
Trump’s explanation for why no one had ever requested that former President George W. Bush provide proof of his citizenship was revealing.
“I’m not saying I’m a fan of George Bush. You know that better than anybody. But George Bush was born in this country,” Trump said.
Similar messaging is present in what Trump said onstage at NABJ — when he asked, “Is she Indian or is she Black?” — and in Fitton’s comments about Harris’ eligibility. .
“It’s an automatic racist response,” Alvin Tillery, the founding director of Northwestern University’s Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy, told NPR. “It’s also white supremacy saying, ‘We can define you. You don’t get to define yourself.’”
Understanding intersectionality
In 2020, Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation and democratization authority, led a study investigating the gendered harassment women political candidates were grappling with. She and her co-authors found some 336,000 pieces of abuse and disinformation targeting 13 candidates. And the person who bore the brunt of this assault? Harris. According to the 2021 report, she “accounted for 78% of the total amount of recorded instances.”
Our current political environment “makes it all the more important that frameworks such as intersectionality remain part of our social justice vocabulary,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, a pioneering scholar of critical race theory, told Capital B. “That’s the only way we can really understand the dual and multiple disadvantages that some members of our groups experience. ”
This story has been updated.