Thread by @studentactivism

The Obama birther claim was a lie about Obama. The Harris birther claim is a lie about the constitution.

This is a big part of the reason why Chris Cuomo's tweets on the Kamala Harris claims were so wrongheaded—it makes no sense to ask for "proof" of a claim when that claim is grounded in a xenophobic lie about the text of the US Constitution.

Wohl didn't claim that Harris wasn't born in the US. He claimed that *even though she was born in the US* she's ineligible to be president because her parents were the wrong kind of immigrants. It's transparent bullshit. It's self-refuting.

So why tell such a stupid, obvious lie? Partly it's penny-ante othering of Harris. But mostly, I suspect, it's intended to undermine the constitution itself—to weaken our collective understanding of and commitment to the country's bedrock guarantee of birthright citizenship.

"If you're born here, you're from here" is a fundamental American principle, born in the aborted Reconstruction-era project of granting full citizenship to former slaves, and always contentious, but by now woven into the fabric of the country's life.

So when someone challenges that principle—when someone suggests that having the wrong heritage or going to the wrong high school makes you less American—you don't ask them for proof. You tell them they're full of shit.

Because yes, this was of course a putrid racist attack on Kamala Harris, it was also, and crucially, a continuation of a larger and deeply dangerous attack on the idea of contemporary America as an essentially multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural nation.