Daniel Chan remembers Taiwanese-American entrepreneur Andrew Yang, one of the Asian Americans who ran for president in 2020. But last week, he was surprised to learn that there is another person running for president then and in 2024 who identifies as Asian American, Kamala Harris.
“I never got that impression,” said Chen, 38, a Taiwanese-American from Connecticut.
Harris, the vice president and likely Democratic presidential nominee, is widely known as the first black woman to be elected vice president.
But Harris, whose mother immigrated from India and whose father immigrated from Jamaica, is not well known as an Indian American or Asian American. According to a recent survey by the Asian American Foundation, when asked to name a famous Asian American, only 2 percent of Americans said Kamala Harris.
Harris isn’t shy about talking about her Indian heritage and Asian American identity. She often talks about the strong influence her Indian mother and grandfather had on her life. As vice president, she has often spoken in terms of “we” and “us” and referred to herself as “part of the community” when addressing gatherings of Asian American leaders.
Harris, who took the job as a freshman senator in 2017, was also a member of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus. She has been a high-profile representative of the Biden administration for Asian Americans, hosting Diwali and Lunar New Year celebrations and even an Asian-themed night market at her Washington residence.
Harris has long been frustrated by questions about her racial identity, insisting she has always been happy and proud of her background.
“I’ve never had an identity crisis,” Harris told the hosts of the Los Angeles Times podcast “Asian Enough” in 2020. I need to explain, but I didn’t. ”
The fact that Harris is not widely seen as an Asian American is because the number of multiracial Americans continues to grow and the racial identity of Asian Americans continues to be adopted by only a minority of Asian Americans. It reveals the changing boundaries of race in America. .
When Harris became vice president in 2020, she was considered to have achieved multiple milestones. She was widely praised as the first black woman to take on the role. She was also the first Asian American, first South Asian, first Indian American, and first woman of color. (Her White House biography lists her as “the first South Asian American.”)
The term Asian American is as much a political and cultural identity as it is a geographic and racial label. Since the term was coined in 1968 by student activists in the San Francisco Bay Area, it has grown to refer to people who have roots in more than 20 countries and speak many languages.
But it’s unclear how much Asian Americans will rally around Harris out of a sense of shared cultural identity. More than half of Asian adults living in this country say they most often use ethnic labels such as Chinese or Indian to reflect their heritage, according to the Pew Research Center.
And when the term “Asian American” is used in the United States, it is still primarily associated with East Asians, in part because Japanese and Chinese were the first to come to this country in large numbers. are.
Research shows that Asian Americans and Americans in general are less likely to think of Indians and Pakistanis as Asian than they are to think of Chinese and Koreans as Asian. This trend remains largely unchanged, despite last year’s census report showing that Indian Americans have surpassed Chinese Americans to become the largest Asian group in the U.S. that identifies with a single national origin. .
“There is a long history and ongoing debate about who is classified as Asian American and Pacific Islander,” said Sarah Sadhwani, assistant professor of political science at Pomona College. “And many Indian Americans don’t necessarily feel that the Asian American label applies to them.”
The Bay Area, where Harris grew up, has long been one of the most diverse regions in the country.
“People who come from places like this belong to communities of difference, and being multiracial is not that unusual,” said Nitasha Tamer Sharma, a professor of black studies and Asian American studies at Northwestern University. That’s not the point,” he says.
Multiracial Americans have one of the fastest growing populations in the country, but many are wondering what it means to embody more than one race, especially if those races aren’t white. In some cases, Dr. Sharma said, public understanding still lags behind. According to the 2020 Census, more than 33 million Americans (about 1 in 10) identify with two or more races, and that number has increased by nearly 25 million over the past decade.
“President Obama has given us the vocabulary to talk about the multiracial nature of the United States,” Dr. Sharma said. But Harris is a different matter for the public, she said.
Nam Nguyen, 37, a Vietnamese American from Glendale, Ariz., said it was “kind of cool” to see someone who identifies as Asian American at the top of the ticket. he said. But Nguyen said she’s more excited about Harris’ potential to become the country’s first female president.
“It doesn’t really matter to me that she’s Asian,” he said.
Some Asian Americans are thriving. On Wednesday, more than 1,500 people, including prominent community leaders such as California Congresswoman Judy Chu, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, and former Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, joined the Vice President She joined the call for Asian American women to support her. They called him one of their own.
There is also palpable excitement among Indian Americans. Many Indian-Americans have welcomed Ms. Harris, rejoicing in the stories she has told about her childhood visits to visit relatives in Chennai and her love of South Indian cuisine such as idlis and dosas. .
Neil Makhija, president of the Indian American advocacy group Impact, said that in the days since she announced her presidential bid, Indian Americans have flooded with volunteer work and donations. Many people also took to social media to spread the cry that “Kamala in Sanskrit means ‘lotus’.” In America, POTUS means President of the United States.
Rahul Vachani, 40, an IT project manager in Fairfax, Virginia, said his family was so excited about the idea of having the first Indian-American and first female president that they joined Harris’ campaign as soon as she made the announcement. He said he donated $50.
“My son used to say, ‘I’m going to be the first Indian-American president,’ and now he’s probably the second,” said Vachani, an Indian-American who became an American citizen in 2016. I guess so,” he said.
As vice president, Harris worked to ensure that Asian American voices were included in conversations about important issues such as voting rights, Asian American civil rights leaders said.
John C. Yang, president of the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Washington, spoke with Harris about ensuring language access to the ballot for Asian Americans. I remember talking about it often. Harris previously spoke about the discrimination her immigrant mother faced because she spoke English with a strong accent.
Some people who don’t think of Ms. Harris as primarily Asian American may be drawn to the common experience of being the child of immigrants, or simply feeling like an outsider trying to decipher the mainstream of American society. Some people said they felt a sense of kinship with her because of this.
Malinda Ng, a 22-year-old Cambodian-Lao American student living in Seattle, said, “The need to assimilate into American culture, and how sometimes our parents try to assimilate into American culture, “Some people don’t necessarily understand how difficult it is.”
But like any group, there are limits to the appeal of representation. Like Harris, Kat Wallen, 60, of Clifton, Virginia, was raised by Tamil Brahmin parents from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. She said she felt a personal connection to Ms. Harris.
“I know what she was probably facing: a lot of orthodoxy, an emphasis on education, a very strict family orientation,” Warren said. “That made me respect her more.”
But Warren said those similarities were irrelevant to her decision. Warren has voted primarily for Democrats in the past, but she has serious concerns about the party’s stance on issues such as crime and education and is still deciding whether to vote for Harris in November. spoke.
“I’m kind of proud to see her up there,” Warren said. “But I’m going to look at the issue much more than someone’s ethnicity.”
