On the depressing Kamala birtherism …
by digby
Sen. Kamala Harris pushed back Saturday against online attacks about her race, comparing the latest jabs to the racism faced by former President Barack Obama, as fellow 2020 candidates rallied to her defense.
During Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate, Donald Trump Jr. retweeted to his millions of followers a Harris critic who took issue with her identity.
“Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican,” the critic, who identified as African American, wrote. “I’m so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history. It’s disgusting. Now using it for debate time at #DemDebate2? These are my people not her people. Freaking disgusting.”
Trump Jr. shared the tweet with the comment, “Is this true? Wow.” He has since deleted the tweet and a spokesman for President Donald Trump’s son told the New York Times that it was a misunderstanding.“Don’s tweet was simply him asking if it was true that Kamala Harris was half-Indian because it’s not something he had ever heard before,” spokesman Andy Surabian told the Times. “And once he saw that folks were misconstruing the intent of his tweet, he quickly deleted it.”
Lily Adams, the campaign communications director for Harris, dismissed the attack, explaining that people, including President Trump, used similar rhetoric to question Obama’s birthplace. Obama was born in Hawaii.
“This is the same type of racist attack his father used to attack Barack Obama,” Adams told CNN. “It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.”
[…]
Harris, who was born in the US to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father who were both immigrants, has directly confronted critics before who have questioned her black heritage, her record incarcerating minorities as a prosecutor and her decision to marry a white man.
In an interview with The Breakfast Club hosts DJ Envy and Charlamagne Tha God that aired in March, the show’s hosts asked the California Democrat to address a series of derogatory memes that have circulated on social media. One of the hosts cited a meme that said Harris is “not African-American” because her parents were immigrants and she spent her high school years in Canada.
“So I was born in Oakland, and raised in the United States except for the years that I was in high school in Montreal, Canada,” Harris responded with a laugh. “And look, this is the same thing they did to Barack (Obama). This is not new to us and so I think that we know what they are trying to do.”
“They are trying to do what has been happening over the last two years, which is powerful voices trying to sow hate and division, and so we need to recognize when we’re being played,” Harris said.
[…]
Twitter confirmed to CNN that it had suspended some accounts that had been attacking Harris’ race, but said that those accounts had been suspended for other rule violations.
Here’s the depressing part:
“Our policies ban misleading, deceptive, and spammy behavior and prohibit attempts to game trends or cause unrelated Tweets to appear in search results. We’ve aggressively stepped up our actions in this regard,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement. “In addition to these existing preventative systems, we will be protecting the integrity of the conversation around key topics and trends throughout the election, including during debates. We saw no coordinated use of automation during recent debates.”
If that’s true it means there were a whole bunch of real people tweeting that stuff. And, it’s a real thing, not just a right wing troll. This won’t be the last we hear of this.
But make no mistake, it’s definitely a right-wing troll. Bon Domenech is selling “Kamala is a cop” t-shirts. Like wingnuts suddenly don’t like cops …
Oy.
.