The Rise of Neobirtherism

The first iteration of birtherism was a synthesis of conservative ideology aimed at the first Black president, Barack Obama. It said that immigrants and nonwhite people had usurped the birthright of real Americans, who were white, and inverted the natural hierarchy of the nation.

The second iteration of birtherism, directed at Kamala Harris, who would be America’s second Black president, is similarly ideological. But it tells a different story, one in which Black identity confers an unfair advantage over white people—an advantage that is doubly unfair for Harris to seize because she is not truly Black.

[Adam Serwer: Why some Republicans can’t resist making vile attacks on Harris]

This is what Donald Trump meant when he smeared Harris during an appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention on Wednesday. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when 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?” Trump said.

The first thing to understand is that Trump’s professed ignorance is a lie. Harris was identified in news reports as the first Black woman to become a district attorney in California back in 2003, when she won office in San Francisco. Trump donated to Harris twice in 2011 and 2014, during her campaign for attorney general of California, around the time she was being touted as “the female Obama” precisely because she is Black. In 2020, a Trump campaign spokesperson pointed to those donations as proof that Trump was not racist, saying, “I’ll note that Kamala Harris is a Black woman and he donated to her campaign, so I hope we can squash this racism argument now.” Harris did not recently become Black; Trump recently decided to pretend to be confused about it.

But the attack is also a smear, because Harris has never hidden her background as the child of an Afro-Jamaican father and an Indian mother, having gone to the historically Black Howard University and joined a Black sorority. I suspect that this attack emerges out of a place of fear and desperation. Trump is afraid that he is running against the second coming of Obama, rather than the aging white man he had built his campaign around defeating.

Conservatives have attacked virtually every Black person who has risen to public prominence in the past few years as a “DEI hire”—that is, as someone who was given their status rather than earning it. Now, it bears repeating that this narrative is false, that Black and white working- and middle-class Americans have more interests in common than in conflict, and that demagogues like Trump have used this kind of racial division to facilitate the upward redistribution of economic and political power for centuries.

Trump’s attack on Harris is meant to evoke this worldview, in which Black advancement is a kind of liberal conspiracy to deprive white people of what is rightfully theirs. Trump is saying that Harris became Black only when it was obvious that being Black conferred social advantage. Trump stumbled at NABJ after he declared that immigrants were stealing “Black jobs” and the hosts asked him to explain what a “Black job” was, but in context it is fairly clear. Black jobs are high-effort and low-wage, while white jobs include things like being president. Everyone in their place.

Trump’s smear of Harris is also an accusation of racial disloyalty—that she was ashamed of being Black until it was politically convenient. Racial treason is something Trump finds particularly offensive. He has begun referring to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, as “Palestinian,” doubly racist in that it turns Palestinian into an epithet and castigates a Jewish man for being insufficiently loyal to his own people. The idea that liberal Jews are not truly Jewish operates similarly to Trump’s attack on Harris, in that it gives the speaker permission to attack a Jewish target in anti-Semitic terms because the target is not “truly” Jewish. Attacking Harris in racist terms, under this logic, is not racist, because she is not “truly” Black. The point of this rhetorical maze is simply to justify racist attacks on a particular target while deflecting accusations of bigotry.

There is of course nothing unusual about Black Americans being of mixed or Caribbean heritage: The Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X, with his red hair and Grenadian-born mother, was both. Chattel slavery, which existed longer on this continent than the United States has existed, was a form of systematized rape in which white men who publicly advertised their deeply Christian piety ran slave-labor camps filled with their own children. As the southern white aristocrat Mary Chesnut wrote in her diary, “God forgive us but ours is a monstrous system and wrong and iniquity … Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children.” Some of the dimmer conservatives on the internet have suggested that being descended from slave owners makes a person not Black; you have to wonder if these people are capable of counting to 10 on their fingers.

Historically in America, white identity has been defined by the completely unscientific concept of racial purity, the most infamous example being the “one-drop rule” that labeled anyone with African ancestry as Black. As a result, Black American identity has long been inclusive and expansive.  

“White friends, Black people do not all look alike,” the legendary Black comedian Redd Foxx told the audience at The Flip Wilson Show in 1974. “It is you who all look alike. I’m gonna prove it. White friends, look all around the room. All the whites look at each other. All of y’all are just white. Now look at us, all different colors. Black walnut. Burnt almond. Chocolate. Chocolate mocha. Pecan. Vanilla. Yella, mella, light bright and damn near white!” Foxx was describing the live audience at the show, but he might have been describing many Black family reunions.

If Foxx’s joke is a funny inversion of a racist stereotype, it also gets at the tragic origins of Black American identity. Trump’s attempt to say that a Black woman with a non-Black parent cannot be Black is an imposition of the concept of racial purity on a culture that does not share it.

I wish I could say that any of this is new. In fact, it is all emblematic of how much the racist politics of the past remain with us. The worldview behind the “DEI hire” smear is one that conceives of Black people as incapable of rising on their own merits but instead achieving only at other people’s expense. Even attacking Harris as not really Black is a way to diminish her success by suggesting that a “real” Black person would be incapable of reaching such heights without unjust assistance.

[Adam Serwer: Birtherism of a nation]

In 1865, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass—whose owner before he escaped bondage was likely his father—described a dynamic that is jarring in its familiarity: Black people are defined as “not Black” the moment they escape the conceptual prison of racist stereotype.

“When prejudice cannot deny the black man’s ability, it denies his race, and claims him as a white man. It affirms that if he is not exactly white, he ought to be. If not what he ought to be in this particular, he owes whatever intelligence he possesses to the white race by contract or association,” Douglass said. “They are treated as exceptions, individual cases, and the like. They contend that the race, as such, is destitute of the subjective original elemental condition of a high self-originating and self-sustaining civilization.” This contention, which is of course a rationalization, is necessary to preserve a racist conception of Black people as inherently limited compared with white people. The moment they show themselves to be intelligent and capable, they cease to be Black, because racists define Blackness as the absence of such capabilities. It was just last week, after Harris announced her candidacy, that Republican leaders were pleading with their own membership to stop attacking her with the same racist stereotypes about Black people that they had wielded against Obama.  

In Douglass’s case, any insistence by his racist critics that he was not truly a Black person was soon contradicted by their behavior. We know they saw him as a Black person, because they treated him as one. The same is ultimately true of how Trumpists treat Harris.