Perspective: An Acclaimed Historian Endorses Kamala Harris
MANISHA SINHA, a historian who focuses on America, urges her fellow desis to vote for the first Indian American President. Voting for Kamala Harris should not just be a matter of identity politics, she notes, but a rallying cry to save democracy in our adopted nation.
In 2020, when I wrote about Kamala Harris’s selection as the Democrats’ Vice Presidential candidate, “Not only does she represent the very groups mocked and vilified by Mr. Trump—women, black people, and immigrants—but also, as a woman of Afro-Indian descent, she might very well be the future face of American politics,” I was not predicting current events. When I wrote that President Biden’s decision to pick then Senator Harris as his running mate seemed “like a personal gift to me,” I did not think it would be a gift that would keep giving.
Perhaps, never has the old feminist slogan, “the personal is political,” struck so close home to me, an Indian American immigrant. Trump, of course, has questioned Harris’s black identity claiming that she had always identified as Indian during his bizarre interview with the National Association of Black Journalists. He even posted a picture of her in a sari with her maternal grandfather and mother in India to portray her as an outsider. Ironically, it was Harris’s Indian roots that attracted me first to her candidacy and it is an aspect of her identity that has received relatively little political commentary. In her recent interview on CNN, Kamala Harris refused to entertain Trump’s silly remarks or reduce her historic run for Presidency to merely a matter of identity.
As the Democratic presidential nominee, however, Kamala Harris is poised to become the first South Asian female President of the United States. The Indian Americans for Biden-Harris group has effortlessly become Indian Americans for Harris. A demographic that has historically voted Democratic in large majorities has been reinvigorated by Harris’s candidacy. Media content creator Abhay Dandekar’s photograph of Harris with “Kamala means Lotus in Sanskrit, and POTUS in American” (see picture) immediately went viral, but he was miffed that even The New York Times did not credit him with its creation.
2016 was my annus horribilis when Trump won the Electoral College, with the largest losing popular vote margin of any President in American history, and my nearly 92-year-old father passed away in India. This year when my still sharp and relatively healthy 97-year-old mother left us peacefully in her sleep, I was filled with dread for the 2024 elections, especially after that awful Presidential debate in June. Their words still ring in my ears. My father warned that the United States of America was in danger of becoming “the United States of Trumpistan.” My mother in her folksier manner said that Trump behaves like a dog. I think she would have approved of President Biden’s allusion to Trump having “the morals of an alley cat.”
Who knew then of the seismic change in our political landscape when President Biden decided to step down and hand over the torch to Vice President Harris? I was one of those die-hard Democrats who stuck by the President until the end, thinking that switching horses mid-stream is never a good idea. Biden displayed extraordinary selflessness, conduct Trump could learn from, and his endorsement of Kamala Harris has ensured a virtually seamless transition to her as the Democratic presidential candidate. Throughout her tenure as Vice President, Harris has been consistently underestimated and belittled, something I and countless American women of color could immediately identify with. If anything, her expert rollout has revealed how her years as Vice President have served as a political training ground for her.
Just as Obama balanced his ticket with Biden and Biden balanced his with Harris, she has chosen the progressive Governor Tim Walz, a perfect spokesman for the American heartland as her running mate. We seem to have the 2024 version of the Farmer-Labor Party that arose in Minnesota over a century ago. If anything, the Harris-Walz ticket has shown that progressive positions on what is normally dismissed as simply identity politics can be combined with economic populism, policies that cater to a broad swath of the American working population, rather than the faux populism of Trump that is friendly to billionaires. Trump has responded with time-worn red scare tactics, calling her “Comrade Kamala” who will make America communist, a ridiculous claim amplified by the authoritarian leaning Elon Musk on X.
The “memefication” of the Presidential campaign in social media has also worked largely in Harris’s favor. Even right-wing memes on her laugh, as if laughter is not the best medicine, and that famous line, “Did you fall out of a coconut tree,” which I immediately recognized since my Indian mother also used a version of it, have backfired. “Tum kahan se tapak gaye,” she would remind me if I got too big for my boots!
The Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s flat-footed comments from before and now have become the butt of internet jokes. While cats and couches have had their day, it was Vance’s strange response to racist attacks on his wife Usha Vance that repelled most of my Indian American friends. He said in an interview with ex-Fox News persona Megyn Kelly that Usha was clearly not a “white person,” as if her Indian heritage was some sort of disability to overcome, but that he loved her, and she was a good mother. We all heard the dog whistle loud and clear. Vance’s antediluvian views on women’s rights, even though he is married to an accomplished Indian American woman, reek of hypocrisy.
In a recently surfaced 2020 podcast, Vance managed to insult his mother-in-law, who took a sabbatical for a year to take care of their firstborn. Not only is she an academic and Vance has classified professors as “the enemy,” but he agreed with his interviewer that it is the duty of “post-menopausal females” to take care of their grandchildren. When his interviewer said that it was a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman,” Vance did not come to his wife’s or mother-in-law’s defense. I remembered my own mother traveling from India to stay with me when I had my son and my American friends remarking on how relaxed I looked for a first-time mother. Certainly, marrying Usha has gained him no brownie points from Indian Americans; just the opposite.
At the same time, I dreaded the kind of vicious racist and misogynistic attacks that would be directed at Harris. As if on cue, Trump’s insistence on deliberately mispronouncing Harris’s name, Kamala, rubs most Indian Americans the wrong way. And a man, who thought we had airports during the Revolutionary War and confuses political asylum with insane asylums, claims that Harris has a “low IQ.” Trump seems envious of Harris, claiming somewhat ridiculously that he is “better looking” than her. President Obama had called her the best-looking Attorney General in the United States. It doesn’t hurt that Harris is attractive but like most women running for office, she should be judged on her policies rather than her looks. And a man who has been convicted of sexual assault and is a serial predator has the temerity to cast vulgar aspersions on Kamala Harris.
Trump is also jealous of the large crowds she attracts, falsely claiming that they are the product of AI, adding to his litany of lies. He even contended that the mob he riled up during the January 6th insurrection of 2021 was larger than the enormous crowd for Dr. Martin Luther King’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. It is worth noting that Inauguration Day 2025 will fall on MLK Day, a national holiday. It should be obvious which candidate represents Dr. King’s dream better. The Civil Rights movement and many of its major leaders, we all know, were inspired by the Indian struggle for freedom and Mahatma Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha and nonviolent resistance to evil. It is worth noting that Kamala Harris’s grandfather was a freedom fighter.
In fact, biracial Harris has always proudly claimed her African American roots, a fact that does not sit well with some insular, conservative, and yes, racist South Asians. Some are also supporting Trump, like the eminently dislikeable Vivek Ramaswamy and the chameleon-like Nikki Haley, who discarded her Indian name early and dutifully lined up behind Trump after challenging him for the Republican Presidential nomination. (This is after Trump humiliated her by calling her “Namrada” as he calls Kamala, “Kamabla.”) She has even tried to stop the Haley voters for Harris from using her name. Haley recently criticized Trump’s race-baiting campaign tactics but still plans to vote for him. The Indian American journalist Sree Sreenivasan developed the popular hashtag, #Desihallofshame, for some particularly despicable characters like Dinesh D’Souza, Kash Patel, and Harmeet Dhillon, who supported Trump’s ill-fated putsch to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential elections. All three have brought shame to the Indian American community.
Much to Trump’s ire, Harris’s candidacy has undeniably injected a massive dose of fresh new energy into the Presidential election, and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago rode that wave. The record-breaking fundraising, voter registration, and volunteers signing up have left even seasoned political commentators surprised. This was no temporary honeymoon or coup or coronation, as many Republicans groused. With black women taking the lead, “Kamala broke Zoom” when hundreds and thousands of different affinity groups gathered on Zoom totaling huge donations to her campaign. I joined the South Asian women for Kamala Zoom call and the enthusiasm was infectious. When my husband, who normally disdains identity politics, wanted to join the “White Dudes for Kamala,” I knew we were witnessing a movement and not a moment. And clearly, Walz’s branding of MAGA has been successful. My biracial sons,
Sheel and Shiv, pronounced Trump’s comments as just “weird.” When right-wing media personalities, including D’Souza, attacked Gus, Tim Walz’s son, after the DNC, they added “mean.”
For Indian Americans, voting for Kamala Harris, though, should not just be a matter of identity politics but a rallying cry to save democracy in our adopted country. Trump’s racism towards nonwhite immigrants, his felony conviction on 34 counts, not to mention his attempted coup and impeachments, disrespect for our veterans, and pandering to authoritarians like Putin, Xi, and Orban, should disqualify him from receiving even a single American vote. The Indian American venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who may not see eye to eye with Democrats on all policies, has announced his support for Kamala Harris and taken on Elon Musk on Twitter (now called X). Unlike Musk, who supports a ticket that denies science, Khosla has a genuine concern about climate change. The Indian American Impact fund has a website “Kamala ke Saath: Electing the First Desi President.” As an American historian, I urge all my countrymen and women to vote for the first Desi President to preserve our experiment in democratic republicanism. As Kamala Harris put it in her acceptance speech at the DNC, her story is possible only in, what Abraham Lincoln called, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Manisha Sinha is President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut. She is the author and editor of several books, most recently The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic (Liveright, a subsidiary of W.W. Norton, 2024). She is the recipient of many fellowships including the Guggenheim in 2022. Reprinted with permission from American Kahani, where it first appeared.
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