Sumana Kasturi 
As campaigning for the US presidential election heats up, two women of Indian origin stand front and centre. One is Kamala Harris, sitting US Vice President and leading candidate for the Democratic nomination. The other is Usha Vance, American lawyer and wife of the Republican pick for Vice President, JD Vance. And so, we have two brown American women – both lawyers – standing at the pinnacle of political power in this most partisan, rollercoaster of a race that is the 2024 US Presidential election.
Cue the chest-thumping and hand wringing as racist trolls crawl out from under their slimy bridges.
Politics is messy and nowhere is this more visible than in the ongoing battle for the presidency. The two much-touted aspects of the US are that it is the land of immigrants and a vibrant democracy. The first is certainly true even if the second is debatable. So, it is unsettling to see that immigration issues have taken centre stage in a polity that is bitterly and often violently partisan. The influx of illegal migrants on one hand, and the increasing visibility of non-white immigrants on the cultural and political spectrum on the other, has resulted in a hard right turn. Admittedly, a thorny problem for politicians at both ends of the ideological spectrum, the two opposing platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties have laid bare long-running fissures that now threaten to fracture the country.
What former US President Donald Trump has managed to do – in less than 8 years in active politics – is drag Republicans, some willingly, some kicking and screaming, under one giant red MAGA (make America great again) umbrella of right-wing outrage. While the Republican rhetoric tends to focus on illegal immigrants, that rhetoric is merely a euphemism for something far more insidious and scary: an all-out assault on women and people of colour. The stacking of the Supreme Court and lower courts, abortion bans in conservative States, and casually racist rhetoric, reveal it as a party that is now unequivocally about Christian nationalism, another euphemistic term for what is essentially White supremacism.
The Democrats represent the Left in America (not to be confused with the Communist Left as we understand it in India), and they are a seething, messy, fractured lot. They range between the centrists and the progressives, and while they disagree over many things, the modern Democratic party tends to focus on social justice and equal opportunity in their domestic policy, and are in favour of reproductive rights, working class rights, climate change and immigration reform. This platform puts them in direct conflict with the anti-diversity, anti-women agenda that the modern Republican party has embraced.
It’s tempting then, to set these two women up as oppositional characters in a Marvel movie. The audience can decide who’s the superhero and who’s the villain based on party affiliation and talk about how they’re different, but it’s much more fun to explore their similarities. And there are many.
Both Harris and Vance are California-born and bred: Harris grew up in Northern California, near San Francisco; Vance, in San Diego in Southern California. Both have parents with PhD degrees, working as university professors: Kamala’s mother was a biologist at UC Berkeley, and her father an economist at Stanford. Meanwhile, Usha’s parents continue to teach at UC San Diego as professors of aerospace engineering and marine molecular biology.
Both the women grew up in immigrant households, the elder of two sisters, though in Harris’s case they were raised mostly by their mother since her parents divorced when she was quite young. Both Kamala and Usha trace their lineage to South India, one to Tamil Nadu, the other to Andhra Pradesh.
Kamala, learning to make dosas in her mother’s South Indian kitchen, was acutely aware of her mixed-race and unique identity. Facing racism from within the Indian community, Kamala’s mother is reported to have taught her children to embrace their black heritage. Kamala attended a black church and chose to go to Howard University, a historically black college. In her politics and her campaign speeches, she has come out strongly against racism, sexism, and literally everything that the Republican platform holds dear. First as Attorney General of California and then as Senator, she has drawn both compliments and condemnation for her legislative work.
Usha, on the other hand, is more of an unknown entity. An alumnus of Yale and Cambridge, proud of her Hindu heritage, she is the poster child for America’s diversity-based policies, specifically the success of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965. This is the policy that encouraged highly educated individuals, regardless of race, to move to the United States to live and work. Even as she introduced herself on the national stage at the Republican Convention in Wisconsin last week, huge “Mass Deportation” signs could be seen waving from the sea of red hat-wearing Trump supporters in the arena. For those following US politics, it was a surreal moment of optical dissonance.
In the racist/xenophobic celebratory mood swirling around the Republican party, Usha stands alone on the stage, the subject of considerable speculation on all sides. What to make of this brown woman once a Democrat, now a Republican, on the cusp of possibly becoming Second Lady of the United States, at the very top of a party whose entire platform revolves around anti-immigration rhetoric and white nationalism?
Both women have been subject to the most vicious kind of racism, mostly from right-wing activists. The conspiracy theories, memes and racist attacks have been swirling in ever-widening circles. As for the hand wringing? In Usha’s case, it comes from all over the spectrum. Groups tracking hate crimes have condemned the racist attacks on her; left-leaning journalists speculate if she is feeling trapped or “uneasy” in her marriage; and white supremacists are wondering “what went wrong”, concerned that a VP with a Hindu wife and a mixed-race family will not support their White-first agenda. For Kamala Harris, there is overt racism from the Right and a more subdued, seemingly concerned, kind of racism from the Left.
And the Indian diaspora? They alternate between chest-thumping and hand wringing. Family WhatsApp groups are lighting up with conversations about Kamala’s candidacy: “But people don’t like her” or “I’m Democrat, but she won’t win.” A slew of racist memes targeting Kamala circulate among the diasporic networks. Some are worried what this outright racism means for the general election and what the backlash will be if she wins. Even as liberal women of all races embrace what Kamala represents, tradition-bound ‘desis’ are reluctant to fully endorse her mixed identity.
In contrast, a portion of the India diaspora is celebrating the elevation of one of their own – Usha, not Harris. Comedian Zarna Garg went on the right-wing channel Fox News to tell us that Usha is “brilliant” and agreed, without irony, that Usha, Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley (also first generation immigrants who have amply benefited from America’s openness), represent the pinnacle of success for the Indian diaspora. It’s a reminder that the Indian diaspora can be remarkably blinkered in many ways.
Left or Right, Hindu or Christian, trapped or not, all the hand wringing and speculation is for nought. Neither woman is in need of rescuing. Both have made considered personal and political choices: Kamala, half black, half Indian, attempting to embrace both, and cement her legacy as a true-blue Democrat; Usha, stepping away from her immigrant identity to prove herself in a party that embraces white nationalism and xenophobia, knowing that she will be raising her mixed-race children at the forefront of a socio-political milieu that denigrates the very diversity that her family represents. How will she, a successful professional, show agency within a party that seeks to curb women’s agency?
Usha, an enigma and anomaly, while Kamala, a more known entity, are two women with very similar backgrounds who have chosen very different paths. Now, as they stand at the forefront of two opposing visions for America, it remains to be seen whose vision will prevail.
Sumana Kasturi studies media, gender, and diaspora. She is the author of the book “Gender, Citizenship, and Identity in the Indian Blogosphere: Writing the Everyday” (Routledge, 2019) and co-author of the book “Childscape, Mediascape: Children and Media in India” (Orient Blackswan, 2023).