It started with the screeching tweet.

In 2019, Washington Post reporter Chelsea Janes was covering then-presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’ appearance at her alma mater, Howard University. Janes posted on Twitter (now X) that members of Alpha Kappa Alpha, of which Harris is a proud member, “screeched when she mentioned her time there,” adding, “I didn’t expect to hear screeches here.”

Janes did not know that those so-called screeches were actually a skee-wee, the AKA call done only by members and with enthusiastic recognition. It’s OK that Janes was unfamiliar with it. What’s not OK is that she snarkily posted about it publicly without asking any of the many women making that sound, all probably dressed in pink and green, what it meant. You know, like a journalist?

Of course, Black Twitter told her about herself, but the issue to me was that she felt comfortable making that kind of mistake. Janes deleted the tweet and clarified, but she lacked cultural competency in that space. She obviously didn’t think it was necessary to do any research before posting about it, maybe because she assumed that if it was important, she’d have already known about it.

Wrong.

As now Vice President Harris prepares another presidential run, this time with the backing of current President Joe Biden, I’m gearing up for a whole new wave of misunderstandings, inaccuracies and outright insults when it comes to specifics of her life. Whether it’s her status as part of the Divine Nine, the fact that she’s a graduate of a historically Black college or university, being the wife of a white Jewish guy or growing up as a biracial woman of Black Jamaican and Indian heritage, things are going to come up that reporters or social media posters might not understand.

Which will not stop them from doing it anyway.

I’m not talking about the bigoted pundits, politicians and idiots who are already testing out their most offensively racist or misogynist tropes, whether it’s assertions that Harris slept her way to a job or that she’s inarticulate or stupid. They mean that stuff, and they’re only going to get worse.

I’m addressing the presumably neutral parties who mean no offense but whose ignorance and laziness prevents them from getting it right.

The recommendation of The Root’s Michael Harriot in response to Janes’ blunder was that we need more Black journalists to cover Black culture — not just because they are Black, but because they presumably know more about that culture. This is absolutely true. But we also need any journalist covering any politician, celebrity or person of note to consider that person important enough to do even the most basic investigation into what they’re writing about.

Black, Asian, Latin and other non-white journalists can never use the excuse of cultural assumption in matters outside their community because those of us in mainstream media are expected to know much more about mainstream white culture than white reporters know about ours.

If we don’t, we damn sure better find out. IT’S OUR ENTIRE JOB.

Last year, I wrote a column about how some citizens of X misunderstood a viral post about Harris joyfully dancing to a Q-Tip song at the White House, in which the poster, who goes by the handle PettyLupone, said the moment had her “gagged.” She was using it in the positive, “I’m so excited by this I can’t speak” way it’s utilized in LGBTQ+ and Black circles. But a lot of white Harris fans jumped all over her because they didn’t know what she meant, even though PettyLupone is a noted fan of the vice president as well.

And that type of misunderstanding is now happening again. Many enthusiastic fans of Harris have been using coconut or palm tree emojis to convey their support for her presidential prospects. The reference is taken from a 2023 speech in which the vice president quoted her Indian mother as saying, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” to make a point that young people need to remember that their lives exist within a historical context. Her fans started making coconut memes, even some musical ones, of the moment.

This is meant positively, and some have said it’s an attempt to reclaim the term. But out of context, the use of the word “coconut” is well-known as a slur in some Asian and Caribbean communities, meant to infer that a person is brown on the outside and white on the inside. Having been called an Oreo all my life for similar reasons, I immediately figured it wasn’t something to co-opt and a weird thing to pick up on, in light of all of the other speeches she has made. It didn’t take a lot of research to confirm. TikTok user Isvari Maranwe made a video explaining the history of the phrase and asked followers if “coconut” was possible to reclaim., “Personally, I wouldn’t use it,” she said.

My friend Jaime Joshi Elder, who was born in England with Indian heritage, moved to the States when she was 11 and now resides in West Palm Beach, Florida, told me she’s used that term in jest with friends and family of color “because there is no malice there.” But she doesn’t like the meme, no matter how it’s meant, because it’s too close to a long-recognized insult out of the context of Harris’ speech.

“She’s already dealing with birtherism,” Elder said. “She shouldn’t have to deal with the issues of being called a coconut and dealing with racism or colorism even more.”

Harris has been in the race for like a day and already we’re seeing gaffes, seemingly intentional mispronunciations of her first name and outright slurs. It’s not going to get any better.

But her presence highlights that the media and others can no longer assume they know every context, and that the ones they don’t know don’t matter.

Google is free. Damaging your career is costly.