Disinformation about Harris's race, presidential eligibility recirculates after Biden withdraws
Copyright © AFP 2017-2024. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
Social media posts questioning Harris's candidacy surged across X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and TikTok in the hours after Biden announced the end of his campaign and endorsed the vice president for the Democratic nomination.
Some posts argued she is ineligible because "her father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized US citizen at the time of Harris' birth in 1964." Many attributed the claim to John Eastman, a lawyer who has been charged with attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
AFP and other fact-checking organizations debunked the same claims in 2020 after Biden chose Harris as his running mate.
Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution says "no person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States" shall be eligible for the presidency (archived here). They must also be at least 35 years old and live in the country for at least 14 years.
Harris was born in Oakland, California (archived here) -- making her eligible for office.
David Super, a law and economics professor at Georgetown University (archived here), said in 2020 that the 12th Amendment stipulates: "No person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice president of the United States."
Some posts used the derogatory term "anchor baby" to describe Harris, referencing the myth that newly arrived immigrants regularly give birth in the United States to obtain residency.
That would not change her eligibility, according to Sonia Canzater, an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law (archived here).
Race claims
Biden's exit also sparked a fresh round of claims that Harris is "Indian American" but "pretends to be black as part of the delusional, Democrat DEI quota" -- a reference to the term "diversity, equity and inclusion," a target of attacks from conservatives.
Media reports have on occasion referred to Harris as Black or Asian American, depending on the historical significance of her heritage. In 2020, fact-checking organizations debunked the notion that she "switched" her ethnic identity.
In her 2019 memoir "The Truths We Hold," Harris describes her upbringing by an economist father from Jamaica and a cancer researcher mother from India (archived here).
Her father, Donald Harris, is a professor emeritus at Stanford University who was active in the civil rights movement (archived here).
The vice president has posted several times about her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who died of cancer in 2009 (archived here).
AFP has fact-checked other claims about the 2024 election here.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
