“Madam Vice President, we are ready to help,” Hawaii senator Brian Schatz wrote on X, along with a photo of him … climbing a coconut tree.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed his statement endorsing Harris with emojis of a coconut, a tree and an American flag.
Some memes also see a coconut as the symbol of a brown person who’s white inside. But this is not the origin of the coconut memes.
What is Kamala Harris’ coconut story?
This comes from a remark that Kamala Harris made last May at the swearing-in ceremony of commissioners for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics. She said nobody lives in a silo as she emphasized on the need to support the parents, the grandparents, the teachers and their communities.
“My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” Kamala Harris recounted mother Shyamala Gopalan’s anecdote — a story to suggest that nobody falls from the coconut tree like a coconut. And since Shyamala was born in Chennai, the coconut tree story must have been an Indian one handed down to her by her parents.
Shyamala Gopalan was born in Chennai and was brought up in Madras, New Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta before she went to Berkeley for her Masters where she met Donald Harris at a meeting of the Afro-American Association. They got married in 1963 and Kamala was born a year later.