Even after Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election, Americans continued to debate her race.

During the campaign, President-elect Donald Trump accused Harris, who is biracial, of vacillating between being Indian and black. At one point, a Fox News reporter suggested she started speaking like a Southerner, sparking discussion about her alleged accent.

Across the Internet, rhetoric questioning Harris's racial authenticity unfolded on a very obvious modern cultural battlefield: memes.

Memes are visual markers of cultural events that are often widely circulated and copied due to their simplicity and resonance.

As a professor of African American digital media culture, I believe Harris memes can serve as tools for users to mine complex and unfinished cultural conversations, such as racial authenticity, as I detail in my 2024 book.

In other words, the Harris meme could be seen as representing the contradictions and complexities of Americans on issues of race and authenticity rather than describing the candidate herself.

Coconut tree expression pack

Since Harris doesn't often discuss her multiracial background, the memes allowed the public to discuss the cultural scrutiny of the first Black and South Asian female presidential candidate.

One of the most well-known memes questioning Harris' race is the coconut tree.

The meme was born after Harris gave a speech in which she said her mother would push her to understand her cultural background. Harris said leaders should understand the historical context when trying to help young people get an education. She added that they should focus on the backgrounds of these young people's parents, grandparents and extended families.

At one point, Harris quoted her mother as saying, "Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?"

For some, the coconut tree became a metaphor for joy in a mediocre political system. For example, the North Carolina Democratic Party chairman tweeted in July 2024, “Today we all fell out of a coconut tree and into a gym full of Democrats!!!! 🥥✨🤠🫶”.

However, others spread the coconut image to depict a person who is brown on the outside but white on the inside.

To these Harris critics, coconuts symbolize people who are not of their true race. For several historically inaccurate reasons, the coconut meme represents racial inauthenticity.

The first is Harris' lighter skin tone, ostensibly a measure of her proximity to blackness—the closer to the whiteness of a coconut on the inside, the lighter the color. This is historically inaccurate, as historical scholars have long denied that race can be reduced to biological markers, such as skin color.

The second is Harris’ record as a self-proclaimed “top cop.”

Many black voters believe Harris is violating her black identity, given their disproportionate contact with the criminal justice system.

Here again, the coconut meme shows that she only looks brown but is white on the inside. The inaccuracy here ignores that her non-black parents are not white.

It’s important to note that racially untrue statements like the coconut meme can be deeply hurtful to marginalized and multiracial people.

side eye emoticon pack

Another Harris meme that's flooded the internet is the side-eye image. The photo came after a presidential debate with Trump in September 2024, when Harris looked at her opponent in surprise.

The meme gained traction as viewers expressed confusion (similar to Harris') about many of Trump's claims, including his remarks about Harris' race.

"Whatever she wants to do, I'm fine with it," Trump said during the debate.

In my own circle, women—especially black women—propagated this image. They believe it appropriately reflects a reaction to decades of discrimination.

In my research, I conducted focus groups with black women who detailed the exhaustion of having to remain silent, especially in the workplace when, for example, they were criticized for wearing their natural hair.

For women like the ones I interviewed, online spaces and meme sharing became a form of catharsis.

Harris's favorite expletives

Finally, memes broke out of Harris pausing while talking about Trump in the same debate.

“This…” she said, paused for a long moment, then added, “…the former president…”

Internet users were quick to find a NowThis Impact interview with Harris from August 2024, in which she revealed her favorite mantra. It starts with "m" and ends with "ah," Harris said.

Harris clarified in the interview, "Not with 'er,'" referring to African American vernacular English (Ebonics), in which the "er" of Standard English is often changed to "ah," as in "sistah."

Internet users applauded Harris' long pauses when referring to Trump on two levels: her refrain from using profanity both in interviews and on the presidential debate stage, and her culturally black wink when answering questions about profanity. action.

The swearing is an example, like the side-eye meme, of black internet users identifying with the vice president's endorsement of black culture, in this case via Ebonics.

Raising Black Enough Questions Through Memes

The term racial authenticity itself is a stereotype of an entire group of people. Race cannot be reduced to one experience.

But the familiarity of being a black woman who must remain silent and use the power of her eyes resonates with many black people online. This was evident among respondents to the squint meme on

In this way, Harris memes can be understood as saying less about Harris' identity. They speak more to online users’ complex negotiations with the nuanced (and joyful and complex) nature of race itself.