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Vice President Kamala Harris made history—not only by late entering the race for the 2024 presidential nomination just months before the general election, but also by sparking a firestorm of memes about a coconut tree.

Unless you live off the grid or have absolutely no idea about the internet, you’ve probably seen a few social media posts quoting a line from a Vice Presidential speech last year.

With President Joe Biden dropping out of his race for re-election and Harris considered the likely candidate to succeed him on the Democratic ticket, it’s quite possible that we could soon see our first Black and Asian-American president—and our first meme commander, too.

Below we explain everything you need to know about this viral joke.

What does the coconut tree have to do with Kamala Harris?

The line “coconut tree” originally comes from a speech Harris gave in May 2023 during an event as part of the White House Initiative to Advance Educational Equity, Excellence and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics.

In her speech, the Vice President praised the initiative for focusing on the needs of youth, but also urged the Commissioners to consider the needs of surrounding communities as a whole. “None of us live in a silo. Everything is connected,” she explained.

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To further reinforce her point, Harris recalled an old saying her mother allegedly used to say: “Sometimes she would give us a hard time and say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of everything you live in and everything that came before you.'”

So there you have it! The coconut tree proverb often attributed to Harris actually seems to be knowledge passed down from her mother, Shyamala Gopalan.

How exactly did this sentence become a real meme?

Harris is often the catalyst for some of the most widely shared memes on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. (Lest we forget the “We did it, Joe!” from 2020.)

In this case, it was the combination of Harris’ genuine laughter and the sudden mental image of a coconut tree that instantly catapulted the speech into internet prominence. Naturally, given Harris’ unprecedented presidential bid for this year’s election, her most staunch allies have now seized on the symbolism of the coconut tree to bolster their online support.

On Sunday, Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz shared a photo of himself literally climbing the trunk of a coconut tree. He captioned it, “Madam Vice President, we are ready to help.”

Keep scrolling to see more examples of coconut trees in the context of their habitats and predecessors.

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