How Trump’s attacks on Kamala Harris’s Black heritage are reviving racist ‘birther’ conspiracy theories

Trump’s allies and right-wing media have spent years trying to undermine her legitimacy by attacking her biracial background. His latest lies are turbocharging racist attacks against his rival, Alex Woodward reports

Donald Trump joins a panel at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago (Reuters)

Donald Trump’s false claims that Kamala Harris “happened to turn Black” and only recently “became a Black person” have inflamed racist conspiracy theories surrounding his Democratic rival.

The former president’s allies have seized on his remarks by reviving racist “birther” claims that Trump has repeatedly used to undermine his opponents’ ethnic backgrounds, when he suggested that Harris wasn’t “born in this country” during the 2020 election and years earlier doubted whether Barack Obama was a US citizen by demanding to see his birth certificate.

His latest statements have turbocharged online racism that has surrounded the 2024 election, with supporters posting copies of her “birth certificate” and accusing Harris of “changing” her race for political reasons.

Harris’s father was born in Jamaica and is African-Caribbean, and her mother is Indian. The vice-president has discussed at length her upbringing in a biracial family and as a Black American with family roots in both Jamaica and in southern India.

“I didn’t know she was Black,” Trump told a panel of Black journalists on Wednesday.

“She happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” he said. “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way and all of a sudden she made a turn and she became a Black person.”

Right-wing media personalities have spent years attacking Harris’s ethnicity and claiming she only uses her identities for political reasons. But in the days before Trump’s latest remarks, and after Harris launched her presidential campaign, media figures and social media influencers revived bogus statements to cast doubt on her ethnic background.

“Kamala Harris, though she is now presenting herself as, you know, Malcolm X … she’s half Indian and then half Afro Caribbean, so she really doesn’t have any link to the African American culture, whatsoever,” The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said on the same day as Trump’s remarks.

“Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are seen as these Black people, and neither one of them is Black,” said “Stop the Steal” organiser Ali Alexander.

Joel Gilbert, a prolific conspiracy theorist who elevated unsubstantiated claims about Barack Obama, told Newsmax earlier this month that Harris “has no common experiences with Black Americans”.

Trump didn’t stop after leaving the stage in Chicago. He posted a video of Harris discussing her heritage with Indian American actress Minda Kaling from 2019 and called her a “stone cold phoney”. At a rally in Pennsylvania, his campaign displayed a Business Insider headline recognising Harris as the first Indian American elected to the Senate.

The next day, he posted a well-known photograph of Harris with her family wearing saris. “Thank you Kamala for the nice picture from many years ago!” he wrote.

Trump’s latest statements have fed an information gap that his supporters have filled with racist attacks and false claims, while his allies rushed to his defence in an attempt to rephrase or interpret what the former president said.

“Unlike you, Kamala, I know who my roots are,” Trump’s attorney Alina Habba, whose parents emigrated from Iraq, told a campaign rally crowd in Pennsylvania hours after Trump’s remarks.

Trump’s running mate JD Vance – whose children are biracial – said reactions to Trump’s statements are “hysterical” and then compared Harris to a “chameleon”. In remarks to supporters on Wednesday, he called Harris “fake” and “phoney”.

Trump-allied far-right activist Laura Loomer posted on social media what she said was a copy of Harris’s birth certificate as alleged evidence that Harris is “not Black and has never been”.

“He [Trump] also has a Fulton County mugshot, his own sneaker line, and three baby mamas. Trump is blacker than [Harris] will ever be!” Loomer wrote.

The purported copy of her birth certificate first circulated in 2020, showing her Black father is “Jamaican” and her Indian mother is listed as “Caucasian.” It does not state Harris’s race.

“She campaigns on being Indian American … now all of a sudden, she becomes, she’s really elevating and pushing her Black side. I think it’s 25 per cent, maybe,” Right Side Broadcasting Network host Paul Ingrassia said during Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania on Wednesday night.

Following Trump’s remarks, Fox News personality Jesse Watters said Harris is “not African American, technically, because she has a Jamaican dad”.

“President Trump is right,” wrote congresswoman Lauren Boebert. “She switched.”

Senator Kevin Cramer told reporters on Thursday that he didn’t believe Trump was “doubting her Blackness” but “making fun of the fact that she chooses it when it’s convenient, and chooses another race when that’s convenient.”

In 2020, when Harris was announced as Joe Biden’s running mate, Trump and his allies spread false claims that Harris was not a US citizen and was ineligible to serve as vice-president because of her parents’ nationalities.

His former legal adviser Jenna Ellis told ABC News in 2020 that Harris’s eligibility is “an open question, and one I think Harris should answer so the American people know for sure she is eligible”.

Then President Trump told reporters at the White House that he had “no idea” if those claims were true.

“I just heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements”, he said in August 2020. “But that’s a very serious ... they’re saying that she doesn’t qualify because she wasn’t born in this country.”

Trump infamously promoted a bogus conspiracy theory that his predecessor was not born in the US, igniting a “birther” movement that relied on Islamophobia and anti-Black racism.

His demands that Obama show his birth certificate in 2011 effectively launched his political career. He then disputed the authenticity of the documents for several years and didn’t acknowledge that Obama was born in the US until 2016, months before his own election.

In a column in Newsweek in 2020, former Trump-allied lawyer John Eastman doubted whether the 14th Amendment – which plainly states that “all persons born or naturalised in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens” – could apply to Harris.

Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1964. Harris is both the first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to become the vice-president.

“The lawyer that wrote that piece is a very qualified, very talented lawyer,” Trump said at the time. “I have no idea if that’s right. I would have assumed the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice-president. But that’s very serious.”

In an X post on July 21 that was viewed 4.4 million times, Tom Fitton, president of Trump-allied right-wing activist group Judicial Watch, shared Eastman’s 2020 Newsweek column and asked: “Is Kamala Harris ineligible to be President under the U.S. Constitution’s ‘Citizenship Clause?’”

Kamala Harris, pictured being sworn in to office as vice-president in January 2021 (Getty)

On Wednesday night, hours after Trump’s appearance in Chicago, Harris was coincidentally booked to deliver remarks to a historically Black college sorority.

The vice-president – an Alpha Kappa Alpha alumna, among the “divine nine” of Black Greek life groups – invoked her “We are not going back again” campaign slogan in her address to members of Sigma Gamma Rho.

“Donald Trump spoke at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, and it was the same old show – the divisiveness and the disrespect,” she said. “And let me just say, the American people deserve better. The American people deserve better.”