WASHINGTON: Kamala Harris, the first Indian-origin Senator and one of the top Democrats eyeing the White House in the 2020 presidential run, has been racially targeted online of her identity as "not an American Black", according to media reports.
Harris, 54, 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. Harris, Senator from California, was the target of birtherism-like attack, the latest jabs to racism faced by former President Barack Obama, CNN reported.
"Birtherism," promoted by some Republicans, including President Donald Trump before he assumed the presidency, was a movement that denied former President Obama was a natural-born US citizen, implying he was ineligible to be president.
The viral tweet by right-wing personality Ali Alexander has also gone by the name Ali Akbar, The New York Times reported. The tweet was, however, re-tweeted by President Trump's son Donald Trump Jr.
Trump, a valuable Republican surrogate as his father faces a bruising 2020 race, posted the tweet of unverified information, then asked his more than three million followers: "Is this true? Wow," the report added. "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," said the spokesman, Andy Surabian, "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. It didn't work then and it won't work now," Adams told CNN.
Harris has often resisted sharing her personal background on the campaign trail. But during Thursday's debate, she confronted former Vice President Joe Biden about his history opposing busing and said she herself had been bused to a public school.
Biden, however, defended Harris on Saturday, saying in a tweet that "racism has no place in America."
Other Democrats on the campaign trail chimed in. Washington Governor Jay Inslee accused the Trump family of "peddling birtherism," an apparent reference to the president's attacks against Obama.
US Representative Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, also compared the online attacks, which claim Harris is not a black American because her father is Jamaican, to "birtherism," whose proponents claimed incorrectly that Obama was born in Kenya.