It took less than one day after Kamala Harris was announced as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee for a racist and baseless “birther” conspiracy theory to start circulating among her critics.
The morning after Joe Biden named Harris as his running mate, making her the first black woman and the first Asian American to join a major party’s presidential ticket, Newsweek published an op-ed casting doubt upon the California senator’s US citizenship because she was born to immigrant parents.
The argument was immediately discredited by legal experts, who noted Harris was born in a hospital in Oakland, California, and was thus undeniably a US citizen.
But that irrefutable evidence did not stop Donald Trump, one of the champions of the similarly baseless birther claims against Barack Obama, from stoking the conspiracy theory.
“I just heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Trump said at an August press conference. “But that’s a very serious, you’re saying that, they’re saying that she doesn’t qualify because she wasn’t born in this country.”
The president has continued his attacks against Harris in the two months since, most recently calling her a “monster” after last Wednesday’s vice-presidential debate.
Trump’s efforts to demonize Harris have taken on an added element of desperation heading into the final weeks of the presidential election, as polls show Biden leading nationally and in major battleground states.
The Democratic ticket’s significant polling advantage increases the likelihood that Harris will indeed become the country’s first female vice-president, potentially setting her up for a successful White House bid after Biden leaves office.
But Trump’s comments have underscored a consistent theme of Harris’s entire political career, one that will probably only be amplified if she becomes vice-president: it’s not easy being the first.
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Harris’s involvement with political activism started when she was a child, a fact that she has frequently touted on the campaign trail. Her mother, a cancer researcher from India, and her father, an economist from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s and became involved with the civil rights movement.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
