In 2011, one year before the 2012 election, Donald Trump began to sow completely unreasonable doubt in the veracity of President Barack Obama’s listed place of birth, Honolulu, Hawaii. Trump, who had not yet been president but was perhaps planting the seeds of his forthcoming far-right future, would allege for years that Obama’s birth certificate was fraudulent. Even after Obama won reelection, the accusations didn’t cease—two years into Obama’s second term, Trump continued to cast “birther” aspersions.
The goal was to cast the forty-fourth president as deceptive, shady, and untrustworthy by appealing to the Republican opposition’s prejudices. They were being encouraged to disavow Obama’s United States citizenship so that they could instead denounce him as “Arab” or “Muslim.” As far as the racist right was concerned, either of these accusations being true would completely disqualify him being eligible for the presidency.
During both the vice presidency and brief presidential campaign of Kamala Harris, Trump and his supporters called her race into question. Harris, the daughter of a black, Jamaican-American father and an Indian mother, was essentially accused of becoming Black for votes. At a National Association of Black Journalists convention, Trump inarticulately lied about Harris’ blackness. “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,” said Trump gracelessly.
Once again, the goal was to sow doubt and discord to damage a politician of color’s presidential campaign. Just take a look at Trump’s venue of choice: he deliberately waxed psychotic in front of a room of Black journalists, many of whom wrote for Black publications. His message was clear: Black people should vote for me, not the Black woman, because she’s been lying to you about being Black the whole time.
Recently, a third set of spurious, racially exploitative lies about a politician of color hit the presses. The target: New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who was born in and lived the first six years of his life in Africa. The accusation: Mamdani, an ethnic Indian, was somehow unfit to be mayor because he once listed his race as “African American” on a Columbia University application. And is it really so surprising that a young Mamdani would’ve identified more with the continent he was born on than a country whose people and culture he never lived among?
Needless to say, all of these cases are grounded in racial animus. The tactic has only ever been meant to use a politician of color’s identity against them. The white, racist conservatives responsible for these conspiracies choose to attack their targets’ racial identities as a means of weaponizing what would otherwise be a strength: racial diversity.
Cross-reference this with the strategies being used by the incumbent presidential administration as it seeks to erase Black history, research, education and jobs. What is diverse becomes “divisive” while what is pro-black becomes “anti-white.” It’s merely a game of misdirection and misrepresentation—two of white supremacy’s most proven methods.
Featured image courtesy of Freepik.