Black lotus

Desi Twitter, a handle for South Asians in the US, exploded with warm congratulatory comment when the Biden-Harris ticket won the presidential election, basking in the glow of Kamala Harris’ Indian origins. “Madam Blindian Veep” read one exultant all-cap message.  

There’s an irony in that tweet that may have escaped those who performed celebratory pujas and exulted at the prospect of One of Our Very Own in the West Wing. Closely tracking every American of Indian origin who makes it big in the West (mainly the US) is an obsessive past-time of the Indian media. If he or she has been born and/or educated in India, the vicarious pride swells exponentially. But basically, any successful foreign desi will do — it takes very little to stoke our nationalism.

Still, Indians, whether in the mother country or in the diaspora, may want to pause a bit before they indulge in their wholehearted embrace of Ms Harris, whose Tamilian mother emigrated to the US in her late teen. She represents values that are out of alignment with the majority of her Indian countrymen.

First, it is worth noting that Ms Harris’ is not a standard story of the Indian immigrant made good after a lifetime of unrelenting hard work, though there’s plenty of that. Unlike, say, politicians such as Nicky Haley or Bobby Jindal, both of whom were also born in the USA, Ms Harris identifies as black, a factor that played a critical role in her nomination as vice president in a country where racial tensions have been running high. Unlike her mentor Barack Obama, whose mother was white, Ms Harris has no Caucasian roots. Like him, she was not born into the traditional black heritage either; Mr Obama’s father was Kenyan, Ms Harris’s mother married a Jamaican.

Mr Obama chose to embrace his American black heritage after he became a community worker — David Remnick’s 2010 biography of Mr Obama, The Bridge fleshes out the transition evocatively. Ms Harris’ mother, who appears to be as interesting a woman as Mr Obama’s mother, opted to bring up her two daughters, Kamala and Maya, in the black tradition even after she divorced their father. Lest the bhakts take exception, let me add that Kamala’s mother also educated her daughters in Hinduism and they visited Chennai often, but her upbringing was indubitably of African-American provenance (including the unedifying experience of having white parents forbidding their children to play with her).  

Those who watched the first of those shambolic Democratic primary debates will remember how she called out Joe Biden for his iffy record on supporting school desegregation, which involved, among other things, providing public funding to bus black children to school (Mr Biden’s position on this was complicated, not outright opposition). Ms Harris reminded the man who is now her boss that she was among the early batches of black children who were bused to a then all-white school in California. Later, Ms Harris attended Howard University, a privately funded historically black institution.

District Attorney, Attorney General, Senator, success breeds social acceptance, however grudging, across the  spectrum — it’s only at election time that crude Republicans choose to mispronounce her easily pronounceable name to score cheap points with the party’s poorly educated white base.

Luminous in suffragette white, Ms Harris’ victory speech made it clear that her black identity shapes her worldview. This fact has largely been ignored in the adulatory messaging within the Indian community because of the uncomfortable truth that a strong streak of racism runs through Indians, whether in India or in the US. This much Hasan Minhaj made clear in a powerful out-of-schedule monologue on his now-junked Patriot Act show on Netflix. In the outpouring of public protests against the police killing of George Floyd, he pointed out, there was no sign of the Indian (or indeed the wider Asian) community. Why? Because, he said, Indian Americans share the same distaste for African Americans as their white compatriots. Even in the US, Mr Minhaj told us, Indians tend to refer to African-Americans by the derogatory term kalu. (The unintended co sequence of this was the discovery by a West Indian cricketer why his Indian IPL team-mate had nicknamed him thus.)  In India, educated Indians have only just learnt not to refer to Africans/African-Americans as negro.

So, the reality is that Ms Harris may offer an affectionate shout-out for her chittis in Tamil Nadu, make idlis with Mindy Kaling on YouTube and appreciate all the coconuts that were broken in honour of her election. But she is, by choice, the kalu that many Indians so despise.