Republicans can’t keep their bigoted stories straight on Kamala Harris’ Blackness. In recent days, several Republicans have attacked Harris as a “DEI hire,” suggesting her race (and potentially her gender) is the only reason she’s positioned to take over the Democratic nomination. Less prominent — but no less insidious — are the right-wing social media influencers and other anti-immigrant types who are fueling claims that Harris somehow isn’t Black enough.
Influencers like former Republican House candidate Laura Loomer and right-wing pundit Eric Erickson have sought to use Harris’ Indian and Jamaican heritage to suggest Harris — an HBCU-educated Black woman who’s been clear in identifying herself as such — isn’t actually a Black American or can’t relate to the so-called Black experience.
Or take for example a particularly rich clip of right-wing commentator Nikki Stanzione telling Black voters “she’s not one of you” (forgive me if I don’t take Stanzione’s guidance on who is and isn’t Black). Similar claims are also being promoted by social media accounts linked to the ADOS movement, which purports to represent “American Descendants of Slaves” and which I’ve written about previously for its xenophobic rhetoric toward immigrants.
This tired, ahistorical smear against Harris is designed to drive a wedge between Black people, and the social media campaign echoes one that was deployed against her in the lead-up to the 2020 election. The Wall Street Journal conducted a study in 2019 that found these claims about Harris not being Black were largely fueled by bot-like social media accounts and far-right influencers, from Donald Trump Jr. to the extremist activist Ali Alexander.
“Now, as in 2020, users frequently claim Harris isn’t Black enough or Indian enough to claim those identities,” disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz wrote for MSNBC this week. Jankowicz’s op-ed explores the racist, xenophobic and sexist propaganda targeting Harris in the context of the larger trend of attacks on women in politics, and it provides a noteworthy example of a Russia-based propagandist spreading a similar claim.
It’s important to see how these attacks align with the ways in which Donald Trump’s campaign and its allies have tried to win over Black voters: by suggesting they’re at odds or in competition with immigrants. This is the background for the widely denounced — and patently false — claim that Trump made during the first presidential debate that immigrants are taking “Black jobs.”
Having extremely online trolls frame Harris as insufficiently Black, not Black at all or incapable of crafting pro-Black policies because of her immigrant background only serves Republican interests.
Keep this in mind as you scroll and post online.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.