Perspective: Kamala Harris and Usha Vance: I See Myself in Only One of Them
Two women who look like me are in the national political spotlight this year. Vice President Kamala Harris’ mother hailed from Tamil Nadu; and despite Donald Trump’s claims otherwise, she very much owns her South Asian heritage just as she does her black identity. Usha Vance, the wife of J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, is the daughter of a Telugu couple who migrated from Andhra Pradesh in 1980.
[Left] Vice President Kamala Harris (Photo: Lawrence Jackson/White House)
Both Harris and Vance come across as intelligent, self-confident, strong, and powerful. Both are highly skilled in the practice of law. There is so much of me that I see reflected in the eyes of Harris and Vance.
I should feel a kinship with both, perhaps even more with Vance, whose parents—both of them—are Indian immigrants, unlike Harris, whose father is Jamaican. I should feel enormous pride when I watch these two accomplished women on television. But it is only one of them who inspires such pride. The other represents everything that I think is wrong with this nation.
All my life, I have struggled with my own identity, and only in recent years have I come to embrace it fully. I spent a good chunk of my childhood trying to blend in as my father traveled across the globe to lecture at various universities.
But I did not really know how it felt to be “othered” until my family moved to Tallahassee, Florida, in 1975, only 11 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act that theoretically ended the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation. I attended a public high school that had opened in the wake of desegregation, and yet, I knew little about racism. In my history classes in India, I had learned about Martin Luther King through the lens of Gandhian civil disobedience.
So, I was taken aback when, on the first day in ninth grade, a group of Black girls approached me with this question: “Is your mama Black or is your daddy Black? Which one is Black?” Why would they ask such a question? I thought. Couldn’t they tell my ethnicity? It felt like a rite-of-passage question. In certain ways, it was.
“Neither,” I replied.
From that moment, I was a curiosity, an “other” in my school. There were few students of Asian or Latino ethnicity back then.
High school became intolerable for me in many ways. I had few friends and felt no sense of belonging to any social group. I didn’t have smooth white skin, blue eyes, and silky blond hair that every magazine and television show touted as beautiful. I didn’t have the features of Black women either. And I went home every day to parents who were socially conservative. My father didn’t approve of my wearing trendy clothes or dating or going to parties. I yearned for graduation day, to be done with high school.
Adolescence can be prickly, but that feeling was compounded in my teen years by a sense of inferiority for being physically, culturally, and socially different. I was embarrassed by my Indian identity and afraid to share my experiences with my peers. I told my father not to speak in Bengali with me while in public. I pleaded with my mother not to step out of the car at school if she was wearing a sari.
I remember being asked in social studies class to talk about why Hindus worship cows and why we still lived in grass huts. Or filling out government forms that asked me to specify my race, where the only choices were Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid—none of which I belong to. In 2024, I am still defined as an Asian American, though Asia ranges from Turkey to North Korea.
[Right] Usha Vance, with husband J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president. (Photo: Cropped from original image at Instagram.com/teamjdvance)
The otherness in me multiplied over the years until my journalism career—when writing about identity forced me to explore my own. I used to be close to someone who always introduced me as her Indian friend. It took an enormous amount of courage on my part to ask her why I needed a qualifier. Why did she feel the need to say Indian? She had never thought about it that way, she told me. That was the start of a long journey that I am still undertaking.
But I can, at 61, finally delight in being a desi, in some brown girl magic. I beam with pride to see the enormous strides made by women of Indian heritage, especially when women who look like me take the stage in America’s halls of power.
But that pride diminishes when I see Usha Vance stand by her husband as he supports Trump.
J.D. Vance was once a “Never Trumper” who told Politico in 2016 that "the Trump people are certainly more racist than the average white professional." He also warned that Trump's rhetoric would cause white people to "become more racist over time." But now, he has become a mouthpiece for the very man he despised.
Vance echoes Trump on the issues that matter to me. He tolerates Trump’s inflammatory and racist remarks about immigrants. He opposes abortion—even in cases of rape and incest, same-sex marriage—and gun control. He does not believe man-made climate change poses a threat to the planet and is a strong advocate for the oil and gas industry. But he does believe the Democrats stole the 2020 election.
The Indian media touts Usha Vance as the face of the Indian-American community’s rising clout in this country. I don’t know what Usha Vance’s personal views are—there is not much information about her in the public domain yet—but I do know she publicly supports her husband on the campaign trail. We all know about the famous couples who spar when it comes to politics. Famously, there was the Democratic consultant James Carville and his wife, Mary Matalin, who advised Republicans. Kellyanne and George Conway were a GOP power couple until Kellyanne became Trump’s senior counselor, and George worked tirelessly to defeat him.
But Usha Vance has not opposed her husband’s views, and by not doing so, she represents the Trumpian agenda. She may indeed be a symbol of the rising Indian American clout, but she does not represent me.
Already far-right, racist MAGA supporters like Jaden McNeil have smeared the Vances’ mixed-race marriage and Usha Vance for her adherence to Hinduism. I fear that these attacks will only continue to get more vile in the course of the campaign.
Most of my Indian American friends and acquaintances vote Democratic. A 2023 Pew Research poll found that 68 percent of Indian Americans vote blue or lean blue. Their views might align with the GOP on fiscal conservatism, but the anti-immigrant tropes are a deal killer. Even Usha Vance’s parents are Democrats, according to The New York Times, which reported that Lakshmi Chilukuri, a biology professor, signed an open letter to Trump urging him not to pull out of the Paris accords on climate change. I wonder what Dr. Chilukuri makes of her daughter’s turn in the MAGA spotlight.
I get emotional when I think about how far Indian Americans have come in this country. From the days when Asian immigration was severely curtailed before the 1965 Immigration Act, our star had risen during the tech explosion of the early 2000s that depended heavily on Indian brainpower. And now, Indian Americans are increasingly rising to the top in political power.
But the disappointment I feel in Usha Vance, Nikki Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy is that their support of Trump is a support for divisive and hateful policies that are liable to target their own people.
I get emotional, too, when I think of my own inner struggles to come to terms with the person I see in the mirror. That’s when I am glad there is another Indian woman at the top of the ticket, fighting for a more united America; where one day, I hope, no one will have to be Indian first and a woman second.
[Left] Moni Basu, rocking a sari—a far cry from her high school days when she would plead with her mother not to step out of the car at school if she was wearing a sari.
Harris is a staunch defender of policies and rights that are important to me. She promotes reproductive freedom and affordable health care, and she understands that erasing economic inequality means recognizing the vast legacy of slavery in America. She embraces newcomers to America, just like her parents once were, and has a long history of supporting policies that benefit immigrants. She understands the desperation of those crossing our borders and has introduced bills to improve oversight of immigrant detention centers and provide legal representation for those in deportation proceedings. She wants to do something about gun violence and favors a ban on assault weapons. She believes that we will destroy the planet if we don’t begin to get environmentally savvy.
She speaks a language of unity. I feel safe when I hear her talk about all that she will do if she ascends to the White House. I will be scared if Trump enters the White House again, just as I was the first time he became president. I don't agree with his positions on abortion, tax cuts, immigration, and expanding the powers of the president. But it’s more than policy. It’s personal. Trump’s rhetoric targets me. In his MAGA world, I have at least four counts against me just for being who I am: brown-skinned, immigrant, woman, and a journalist.
J.D. Vance labeled women without biological children “childless cat ladies” with “no direct stake in America.” That includes Harris and me. Usha Vance passed it off as a “quip.” But I don’t understand how she can publicly support a person who says such vile things.
Ultimately, it’s not that I identify with Kamala Harris because her mother, like mine, was an Indian immigrant in America. It’s because I have faith that she will work to lift up all people who inhabit this nation. That she stands for the values that allowed Usha Vance’s family and millions of others like them to prosper and find home in a place far from their homelands.
Veteran journalist Moni Basu is the director of the low-residency MFA in Narrative Nonfiction and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault writer-in-residence at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Born in Kolkata, she grew up straddling two cultures, which shows in her writings on race, immigration, and identity.
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