“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”: Kamala Harris, controlling images, and political memes

Former President Joseph Biden’s late departure from the 2024 U.S. election gave his Vice President, Kamala Harris, just months to garner support for her campaign as the new Democratic candidate. Curiously, on social media the discourse around Harris’s entering the race was marked with coconut and tree emojis, two apolitical symbols that had no official connection to her budding operation nor her opponent’s. In fact, the emojis were in reference to a speech Harris gave in May 2023 that resurfaced in July 2024 with the news of her running in Biden’s place. This essay uses the online commentary and memes around the viral “coconut tree” video to explore the interplay of political memes and (mis)representations of Black women through a qualitative analysis of 100 posts sampled from X and TikTok. On the one hand, the online discourse engendered sexist and racist stereotypes to discredit Harris and her political aspirations. On the other hand, the production of visual and audio memes produced a narrative of joy and happiness that subverted controlling images of Black womanhood. Across both agendas, memes and other forms of digital content reshape how users communicate about politics.