When former President Donald Trump questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ racial identity Wednesday, he lifted a long-standing and false line of attack from the fringes of political discourse to the very center of a presidential campaign.

For years, rivals and critics have lodged accusations that Harris shifts her personal identity to her political advantage and that she is, in fact, not who she claims to be. Those attacks, based on falsehoods, misinformation and conspiratorial notions, have increased dramatically in the week and a half since she emerged as Democrats’ all-but-certain standard-bearer.

Just hours after President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek a second term, right-wing agitator Laura Loomer posted on social media site X that Harris “pretends to be black” as part of what she called a “delusional, Democrat DEI quota.”

The next day, Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who spoke at the Republican National Convention last month, said on his popular interview show that the vice president was “sort of Black, sort of Indian.” Rapper Lil Pump, a Trump supporter who has some 20 million followers across Instagram, TikTok and X, said Sunday that “Kamala Harris isn’t even black…she’s Indian.”

Their comments, seemingly aimed at suggesting to Black voters that the Democratic candidate does not represent them and, more broadly, planting the idea that Harris is inauthentic, helped turn what had been a trickle of such content into a gusher. Overnight, conservative corners of the internet, long fixated on Biden’s age, swung to what looked to be their newest target. Years-old video clips of Harris acknowledging her South Asian heritage found fresh currency, along with memes mocking her speaking style and even a Billy Joel song modified to say that “she’s not Black or white, Indian, Jamaican.”

In fact, the vice president is the daughter of a Black Jamaican father and an Indian mother, both of whom immigrated to the United States before Harris was born in Oakland, California. She has long identified as both Black and Indian.

“This is something she’s dealt with her entire career,” said Neil Makhija, president of the advocacy group Indian American Impact. He pointed out that Harris attended Howard University, a historically Black university, and belongs to a prominent Black sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. “Trump questioning her identity and heritage is nothing new, and it’s part of a long-running strategy of employing racial division and animus.”

On Wednesday, Trump embraced the discourse wholeheartedly while sitting for a Q&A session at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago. “I didn’t know she was Black,” Trump said, “until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black.”

He later followed that statement, which drew gasps from the room, with a post on his social network, Truth Social, that Harris was “stating she’s Indian, not Black” and that she was a “stone cold phony.”

Defenders of Harris compared the remarks to birtherism — the debunked idea that Barack Obama should not have served as president because he was not a natural-born citizen. Trump is widely credited as an originator of the birther conspiracy.

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., who is on the short list to be Harris’ running mate, called the former president’s comments Wednesday “overtly racist.”

The campaign against Harris similarly began with questions about whether she was legally able to serve.

As far back as January 2019, Chris Cuomo, then a CNN anchor, responded to a claim by Jacob Wohl, a right-wing activist and Trump supporter, that she was “not eligible to be president” by suggesting that Harris, then a senator, could settle the matter by producing “proof.”

Harris responded weeks later, saying, “This is the same thing they did to Barack” in an interview on “The Breakfast Club” podcast, which has three Black hosts. “This is not new to us. And so, I think we know what they are trying to do.”

By August 2020, when she was selected to be Biden’s running mate, copies of Harris’ California birth certificate began circulating on social media, often amplified by conservative voices looking to discredit her. They wrongly pointed to a line on the document noting that her father’s “color or race” was “Jamaican” as evidence that she was not in fact Black.

While more than 92% of Jamaicans have Black ancestry, some people have falsely asserted that because her father, Donald J. Harris, was descended from a man who had owned slaves in the early 19th century, he could not be Black. But it was quite common for slaveholders to father children with women held as slaves.

Donald Harris is credited as the first Black scholar to receive tenure in Stanford University’s economics department.

Lavern Spicer, a prominent Trump supporter who is running for Congress in Florida, referred to Kamala Harris as Black in late 2020 but soon began claiming that the opposite was true, stating on social media in January 2021 that Harris “can play the Black card because the media covers for her, but that girl is not Black.” Since then, Spicer has hammered on that point in scores of posts, including one last week asserting that Harris was not Black but an “Indian woman married to a Jewish man.”

Other critics have also challenged her Indian identity, claiming that she hides it for political benefit.

“Show me a picture of Kamala in a sari,” said Vish Burra, executive secretary of the New York Young Republican Club, while discussing Asian American identity on a panel hosted by Vice in late 2022. Burra, who is of South Asian descent, quipped, “I’ve seen Justin Trudeau wear Indian clothes before her.”

(Trump, continuing his false line of attack on Harris on Thursday, posted a photo that has been widely circulated among right-wing influencers in recent weeks of Harris wearing a sari.)

So far, Harris and her campaign have largely tried to avoid debates about her background, focusing instead on the divisive nature of such rhetoric.

Speaking at an event for a Black sorority in Houston on Wednesday evening, Harris avoided any rebuttals to Trump’s statements, saying simply that “the American people deserve better.” But later in the evening, her campaign’s rapid response team took on the matter more directly, posting on X that “Kamala is both Black and Indian” and that “you can be two things at once.”

Regardless, some of Trump’s most avid supporters have dug in. On Wednesday afternoon, Loomer resurfaced Harris’ birth certificate, writing on X that it “proves she is NOT BLACK.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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