Women preparing a kolam in Thulasendrapuram, Tamil Nadu (the home village of Kamala Harris' maternal grandfather) in 2020. Aijaz Raha via the AP By Jessica Namakkal
It has been a big year for South Asian Americans in politics. Before the summer of 2024, there were two conservatives, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, running for the Republican presidential nomination. While they both flamed out early on, they received a good deal of attention from the national media and potential voters as viable candidates. When the Republican National Convention (RNC) rolled around in July, the now official Republican candidate, former President Donald Trump, announced JD Vance, a senator from Ohio, as his running-mate. Vance, a Yale Law graduate and former venture capitalist, made a name for himself in 2016 with the publication of his political platform disguised as a memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Much to the dismay of the hardcore MAGA crowd, Vance is married to and has three children with an Indian American woman, Usha Chilukuri Vance.
Usha Chilukuri Vance took the stage at the RNC the night of July 17th to introduce her husband. Usha and JD met at Yale Law School where they were mentored by the self-proclaimed ‘Tiger Mom’ and poster child for model minority stereotypes Amy Chua.[1] In her speech at the RNC, Usha talked about her immigrant parents, how JD had adapted to their vegetarian diets, and about how her partnership with Vance was made possible by the greatness of the United States. Usha Chilukuri Vance spoke these words while looking directly into a crowd of (mostly) White people holding up signs that read “Mass Deportations Now.”
How, one might ask, could Usha Chilukuri Vance support her husband’s platform of ending birthright citizenship, completely stripping women of all reproductive rights, and inciting the masses to attack and eventually deport non-White immigrants? Although Usha has generally stayed out of the spotlight up until now, following her speech the New York Times ran a profile (under the style section!) that points out that while she has long been a registered Democrat, she considers herself “apolitical.” How is it that a second generation Indian American is secure enough to not have to worry about health care, job security, deportation, or the public school system, when millions of Brown and Black people in the United States face these issues every day? How do South Asian immigrants to the United States fit into the larger landscape of the nation-state?
Usha Chilukuri Vance’s entrance into the political scene as an “apolitical” politician’s wife has been like a steroid shot of model minority discourse, which she herself seems set to embrace. The daughter of two high-achieving (and high caste) parents, Krish and Lakshmi Chilukuri, she has done exactly what needed to be done to fulfill her role as a model minority woman. She has kept her head down, attending Yale as an undergraduate and continued to Yale Law, clerked for two Supreme Court Justices. Despite a successful law career, she has now resigned from her job “to focus on family,” and has asked the media to refer to her as “Mrs. Vance.” By acting the part of the model minority wife, deferring to her husband on “politics” and instead falling in line with the ultra-conservative insistence that women should focus solely on the internal life of her family, she may just be able to distract JD’s fans from her skin color.
In fact, the MAGA crowd has quickly embraced the centuries old racial discourse that high-caste Hindus are Caucasian, an argument frequently invoked by South Asian immigrants seeking U.S. citizenship in the 19th and early 20th-centuries. As historian Hardeep Dhillon has shown, South Asian migrants regularly invoked education and caste in U.S. naturalization applications in hopes of qualifying as Caucasian (opposed to Asiatic).[2] South Asian efforts to be legally classified as White ended in 1923 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided to bar South Asians from becoming American citizens (including denaturalizing those who had already been granted citizenship) in the decision United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind. This regime would remain in place until the 1965 Immigration Reform Act, which opened the U.S. to highly skilled (i.e. highly educated) immigrants.
A few days after the RNC, President Joe Biden announced he was ending his campaign for re-election. Soon after his announcement, he offered his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris is the daughter of a South Indian (Tamil Brahmin) mother and a (Black) Jamaican father. Harris grew up in Oakland, and while she was raised primarily by her mother, she has long identified as Black, attending Howard University and joining Alpha Kappa Alpha, the country’s oldest Black Greek organization for women. When Harris began her campaign to be the presidential candidate in 2020, she started to publicly embrace a South Asian identity for the first time in her political career. One of the ways she did this was to make a video with celebrity desi Mindy Kaling wherein they cook south Indian food together. Within the first 10 seconds, Harris nervously tells Kaling “I’ve never made dosas before,” a moment of vulnerability that I know many children of immigrants, whether mixed race or not, found relatable. Harris did not grow up in an ethnic enclave of similar immigrant families (Usha Chilukuri Vance did), and while she visited India and was very close to her Indian family, her mother raised her to be what she was in her own context: a Black American. Her relationship to India, as is common in the diaspora, is less stable.
Despite Kamala Harris’ late adoption of her Indian identity in the public sphere, Donald Trump has decided that he can race bait her by claiming she was “Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden…became a Black person,” a comment he made during a panel at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in late July. Perhaps he knows that despite the emergence of high profile conservative Republican politicians, as a demographic, South Asians, out of all Asian American groups, tend to vote for Democrats (according to AAPI Data). Writing off the South Asian American vote, he could concentrate on trying to convince Black Americans that Kamala Harris was a race faker. While the MAGA crowd has decided that Usha Chilukuri Vance’s race and proximity to Whiteness can be understood through (debunked and racist) racial science, as well as model minority discourse, Kamala Harris’ Blackness and multiracial identity make her an unstable and untrustworthy person.
Of course, most (non-racist) Americans know that many people are multiracial. As Jon Stewart responded to Trump’s comments on the Daily Show, “If these people ever saw a Pizza Hut/Taco Bell they would lose their minds. What is this a DEI restaurant?” (And as we know from the 2000s hip hop project Das Racist, the combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell IS Brown culture).
Does the South Asian (and specifically, Indian) heritage of these two public women really matter? In terms of potential policy implications or relationship to India, perhaps not. But it is worth thinking about how these two women represent different threads of South Asian American history. In this microsyllabus, I offer some materials to help understand the history of South Asians in the United States.
South Asians and Global Blackness
Kamala Harris’ father, Donald Harris, came to the United States from Jamaica in 1962. While Harris was not Indo-Jamaican, he certainly knew many Indo-Caribbean people growing up because of the long history of South Asian migration to the Caribbean. Many migrants from India were part of a labor diaspora that included indentured laborers sent primarily to the Caribbean after British passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, as well as merchants and civil servants who migrated to East and South Africa. Starting with Indo-African relations in the Caribbean is a good way to understand part of how South Asians operate in relation to global Blackness both inside and outside of the United States.
Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Bahadur was born in Guyana, a descendent of indentured laborers who came from India in the late 1800s. In this book, Bahadur writes about her own search for her grandmother’s history, looking at archival records from the indentured laborer ships that travelled from India to the Caribbean, and traveling to her ancestral village in India to locate her relatives. Throughout the book, she traces the ways that Indian indentured laborers were pitted against the newly freed population of people of African descent, a British system of divide and rule that continues to inform relations between these groups in the Caribbean today. Bahadur, who moved with her family from Guyana to New Jersey in the late 1980s, provides an incredible history of indenture and of the complexity of Indian and African-Guyanese relations alongside a powerful reflection on what it means to be a person of Indian origin who did not grow up (and indeed, had never been to) India. Moving between Guyana, the United States, and India, Bahadur reminds us that nation-states are institutions of control and surveillance, and while we may make our homes in these geographic spaces at certain times, personal and family identity is often a moving and fluid process.
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Dal Puri Diaspora (dir. Richard Fung, 80 minutes, 2012)
The director Richard Fung, who was born in Trinidad to Chinese migrant parents, traces the popular Indo-Caribbean dish dal puri from the Caribbean to North America and back to its roots in India.
Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013).
When Bald’s book came out in 2013, a new chapter of South Asian American history was opened. Bengali Harlem challenges the traditional timeline of South Asian migration to the United States, which typically followed very visible Hindu and Sikh migrants to the West Coast, culminating in the Supreme Court ruling in United States vs. Bhagat Singh Thind. Bald carefully researched the lives of a much smaller group of Bengali-Muslim men who came to the United States as peddlers in the late 19th and into the 20th-century, arriving on the East Coast and traveling South as the summer selling seasons ended. Bald presents stories never told before about Indian men who married Black and Puerto Rican women all the way north in Harlem and moving South to New Orleans. Because of anti-miscegenation laws, these were the most common South Asian mixed marriages of the time. Bengali Harlem shows us that South Asians in the United States lived complex and nuanced lives, integrating with communities of color and creating families that did not fit into the narrative of the post-1965 South Asian model minority immigrant.
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In Search of Bengali Harlem (dir. Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah, 2022)
Bald made this documentary with Alaudin Ullah, the son of a Muslim Bengali migrant to Harlem, Habib Ullah, who had married an African American woman and had children. Alaudin was the youngest of his father’s children, and his mother, Mohima, was a second wife, who Habib brought to the U.S. from rural Bangladesh after the death of his first wife. This searing documentary follows Ullah as he reckons with his own rejection of South Asian and Muslim culture as a kid in Harlem who embraced Black Hip-Hop culture. He works throughout the film to learn more about his ailing mother’s life, including traveling to Bangladesh to meet family.
Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Hip Hop Desis: South Asian Americans, Blackness, and Global Race Consciousness (Duke University Press, 2010).
Sharma’s ethnographic work takes us to the West Coast in the early 2000s, into the world of Desis who make hip-hop and participate in Black and hip-hop culture. Pushing back on the history of South Asians in the US making claims to Whiteness (especially in pursuit of citizenship and respectability), Sharma asks what it means for Desis to associate with U.S. Black culture. An indispensable book on how race operates in the U.S. and the diversity of approaches that the South Asian diaspora has to regimes of Whiteness and Blackness that have constructed racial politics and culture.
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Mississippi Masala (dir. Mira Nair, 1991)
Any discussion of Black and South Asian relations in the United States must include a viewing of Mira Nair’s 1991 Mississippi Masala, starring Denzel Washington as a Black Mississippian and Sarita Choudhury as an Indian-origin immigrant who arrived in Mississippi by way of Uganda and the 1972 Ugandan expulsion of Asians. The story follows the two protagonists who fall in love and struggle to find acceptance, especially amongst the Indian-American community that views Black Americans as the “bad minority” as they aspire to Whiteness.
Also! Durba Mitra, “Mississippi Masala @ 30: Revisiting a Film Classic in Authoritarian Times” Public Books (2022)
South Asians as Model Minorities
Usha Chilukuri Vance emerges from the migration of highly-skilled South Asians in the wake of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Cellar Act), which removed a discriminatory national origins quota system that had excluded most Asians from immigration to the United States. The new law gave preference to immigrants who possessed skills deemed desirable in the United States. For South Asians (at this time, primarily Indians), this meant that highly educated individuals, primarily doctors and engineers, were given visas to the United States.
Usha Chilukuri Vance’s parents came to the United States as professionals, her father Krish Chilukuri, an IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) trained mechanical engineer and her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, a microbiologist and now provost the University of California, San Diego. Journalists have described the family, which consisted of Usha, her sister Shreya, and the parents, as being part of a “close-knit group of six families from southern India” all living in Rancho Peñasquitos, an upper-class suburb of San Diego. (For more on these types of communities, see Shalini Shankar’s Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley, Duke University Press, 2008).
Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who came to the US in 1959, before the 1965 immigration reforms, is from a Tamil Brahmin family. And while at the time of writing I could not find any confirmation of the Chilukuri family caste, there was much speculation on the internet that they were either Brahmin (especially given Usha’s mention of their vegetarianism at the RNC) or perhaps belong to upper-caste Telegu Kamma caste. I mention this not because I think it’s important to know a person’s caste background, but because it speaks to who these families are in India and where they stand in the diaspora. As a person of mixed heritage, Kamala Harris would not carry on the Brahmin line (caste is dependent on intermarriage and endogamy to maintain its lines of descent). Education is at the core of model minority discourse, and for people coming from India, caste and access to education remains a divisive and important topic.
Ajantha Subramanian, The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India (Harvard University Press, 2019).
The role that the Indian Institute of Technology has played in maintaining and transporting regimes of caste structure between India and the global diaspora is explored by anthropologist Ajantha Subramanian in The Caste of Merit. The Indian Institute of Technology (there are multiple locations throughout the subcontinent) are elite institutions that grant graduates not only degrees recognized throughout the world as exceptional but also the upper-class status that comes with this achievement. India, after gaining independence from the British in 1947, proclaimed they would work towards abolishing the importance of caste in Indian society, a goal that has gone unmet. Subramanian shows how the debates over caste quotas at the IITs (similar to affirmative action programs in the United States) have been used by upper caste communities to reaffirm caste supremacy, labeling BC (backwards caste) and Dalit students as undeserving of their spots at these institutions. This important book gives insight into how Usha Chilikuri Vance, whose father and grandfather both graduated from IITs, promotes a troubling belief in the power of meritocracy.
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Yaschia Dutt, Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir (Aleph Book Company, 2019). The India-born, American resident Dutt wrote this powerful memoir about her experience of “coming out” as Dalit. Honest, powerful, and often heart-wrenching, Dutt discusses her own experiences trying to hide her caste identity at the direction of her parents and how she confronted the generational trauma of caste oppression. She also gives an important history of how caste has operated throughout the past century both in India and in the diaspora.
Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
Published in the year 2000 (notably one year before the events of September 11, 2001, which would forever change the lives of Muslim and Sikh Desis), Prashad’s Karma of Brown Folk took up the question of what it meant to be Brown and a model minority in the United States. Building on the work of W.E.B. Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Prashad moves from Dubois’ question of what it means to be a problem to ask South Asian Americans what it means to be the solution. In other words, Prashad asks South Asian Americans to consider the relative privilege they have been afforded as model minorities, which comes at the expense of other Brown and Black folk. Prashad shows how certain high-profile South Asian Americans, people like the new-age guru and Oprah mainstay Deepak Chopra, profit from selling an apolitical and Western-friendly version of Hinduism to the American public. This method of distancing what are seen as neutral Indian cultural exports – yoga, ayruvedic medicine, Bollywood movies – hide the politics of Hindutva, or Hindu supremacism, from an American public. Although a lot has changed since 2000, this book remains an important missive to South Asian Americans on the necessity of organizing around the principles of anti-racism and Hindu supremacy.
South Asian Americans in U.S. Politics
Sangay Mishra, Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
In this landmark book, Mishra looks to the three biggest populations of South Asian immigrant groups in the United States – Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis – and asks if and how these groups participate in political life in the United States. Mishra rigorously examines the fractures in these communities – divisions caused by sectarian divisions in South Asia (e.g. the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguard and the retaliation against the Sikh community in 1984, rising anti-Muslin xenophobia in India), and in the United States (i.e. the distancing between Hindus and Muslims after the events of September 11, 2001). Taking seriously race, religion, and global politics, this book is an essential work for anyone interested in how the diaspora operates in the United State today.
Neema Avashia, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place (West Virginia University Press, 2022).
Avashia, a writer, teacher, and organizer, grew up in the 1980s in West Virginia. Her parents, both from Gujarat, had come to West Virginia because her father was employed as the company doctor for Union Carbide (yes, the same Union Carbide responsible for the 1984 chemical disaster in Bhopal, India), treating workers and community members who were often dealing with the consequences of working with and near dangerous chemicals. Avashia writes beautifully and with great empathy about West Virginia and her fellow Appalachians, showing how the hardships of poverty and lack of resources leads not necessarily to xenophobia and coemption but instead to curiosity and mutual aid. She does not sugar coat or romanticize the experience of being an immigrant and a Hindu and a queer woman in an extremely White, Christian, heteronormative place, but instead explores how her discomfort with not fitting in shaped who she is today: a person with many identities and communities throughout the world.
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The following works came out in response to Kamala Harris’ 2020 campaign season but remain relevant today.
Pawan Dhingra, “What It Means to Claim Kamala Haris as “One of Us”” Amerasia Journal 46:3 (2020): 270-272.
Listen: NPR Codeswitch, “Claim Us if You’re Famous” (feat. Nitasha Tamar Sharma) (November 10, 2020)
Nico Slate, “The Other Kamala: Kamala Harris and the History of South Asian America” Tides: Magazine of the South Asian American Digital Archive (2019).
Jessica Namakkal teaches in the Program in International Comparative Studies, History, Asian American and Diaspora Studies, and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of the book Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Columbia University Press, 2021). She has also written about her own South Asian American identity for the South Asian American Digital Archive
[1] Model minority is a term used to describe the narrative construction of certain minority groups as good at the expense of other groups who are seen as bad. In the United States, this designation has typically been used to promote high-achieving immigrant groups, including most Asian-Americans (including Hindu-Indian South Asians), who are then placed in comparison to Latinx, Black, and Indigenous Americans.
[2] Hardeep Dhillon, “The Making of U.S. Citizenship Law and Alienage: The History of Asian Immigration, Racial Capital, and U.S. Law,” Law and History Review 2023 (41) 1: 1-42.