The Lesser-Known Side of Harris’s Identity: Asian American
“Some Asian American leaders are rooting for Kamala Harris to become the first Asian American president. But she is not widely known as Asian American, reflecting the complexity of the identity.
By Amy Qin
Amy Qin spoke to Asian American leaders, scholars and more than a dozen Asian American voters from across the country.
Daniel Chiang can remember one Asian American who ran for president in 2020: Andrew Yang, a Taiwanese American entrepreneur. But he was surprised to learn last week that there was another person running for president then, and in 2024, who counted herself an Asian American: Kamala Harris.
“I never got that impression,” said Mr. Chiang, 38, a Taiwanese American from Connecticut.
Ms. Harris, the vice president and likely Democratic nominee for president, is known widely as the first Black woman to be elected vice president.
But Ms. Harris, whose mother emigrated from India and whose father emigrated from Jamaica, is less known as an Indian American and Asian American. Asked to name a famous Asian American, only 2 percent of Americans said Kamala Harris, according to a recent survey by The Asian American Foundation.
Ms. Harris does not shy away from talking about her Indian heritage and Asian American identity. She speaks often about the strong influence her Indian mother and grandfather had on her life. When she has addressed gatherings of Asian American leaders as vice president, she has often spoken in terms of “we” and “us” and referred to herself as a “member of the community.”
As a freshman senator, Ms. Harris, who assumed that role in 2017, was a member of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, as well as the Congressional Black Caucus. She has been a high-profile surrogate for the Biden administration to Asian Americans, hosting Diwali and Lunar New Yearcelebrations and even an Asian-themed night market at her residence in Washington.
Ms. Harris has long chafed at questions about her racial identity, arguing that she has always been comfortable with and proud of her background.
“I’ve never had an identity crisis,” Ms. Harris told the hosts of The Los Angeles Times’s podcast “Asian Enough” in 2020. “I guess the frustration I have is that people think I should have gone through such a crisis and need to explain it, but I didn’t.”
That Ms. Harris is not widely seen as an Asian American reveals the shifting boundaries of race in America, where the number of multiracial Americans continues to grow and where the big-tent Asian American racial identity is only adopted by some Americans of ethnic Asian descent.
When Ms. Harris became vice president in 2020, she was regarded as achieving multiple milestones. She was widely hailed as the first Black woman to assume the role. She was also the first Asian American, the first South Asian, first Indian American and first woman of color. (On her White House biography, she is identified as the “first South Asian American.”)
The term Asian American is simultaneously a geographic and racial label, and also a political and cultural identity. Since the label was coined by student activists in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968, the term has grown to refer to people with roots in more than 20 countries and those who speak numerous languages.
But it is unclear how much Asian Americans will rally around Ms. Harris from a sense of shared cultural identity. More than half of Asian adults living in the country say they most often use ethnic labels — like Chinese or Indian — to reflect their heritage, according to the Pew Research Center.
And in the United States, when the term “Asian American” is used, it is still primarily associated with East Asians, in part because Japanese and Chinese people were the first to come to the country in large numbers.
Surveys have shown that Asian Americans and Americans more generally are less likely to think of Indians and Pakistanis as Asian than they are to think of Chinese and Koreans as Asian. That has remained largely the case, even as Indian Americans have surpassed Chinese Americans to become the largest Asian group in the United States among people who identify with one country of origin, according to a census report last year.
“There’s a long history behind who gets categorized as Asian American and Pacific Islander, and that continues to be contested today,” said Sara Sadhwani, assistant professor of politics at Pomona College. “And many Indian Americans don’t necessarily feel that the Asian American label applies to them.”
The Bay Area, where Ms. Harris grew up, has long been one of the most diverse regions in the country.
“When you come from places like this, you are in communities of difference and being multiracial is not that abnormal,” said Nitasha Tamar Sharma, a professor of Black studies and Asian American studies at Northwestern University.
Although multiracial Americans are one of the fastest-growing demographics in the country, the public’s understanding of what it means to embody multiple races — especially when those races are not white — is still lagging, said Ms. Sharma. More than 33 million Americans — about one in 10 — identify as being of two or more races, a number that grew by nearly 25 million people in the past decade, according to the 2020 census.
“Obama gave us some vocabulary for talking about multiraciality in the U.S.,” Ms. Sharma said. But Ms. Harris, she said, was another matter for the public.
Nam Nguyen, 37, a Vietnamese American from Glendale, Ariz., said that it was “kind of neat” to see someone who also identified as Asian American at the top of the ticket. But Mr. Nguyen said he was more excited about the possibility that Ms. Harris could be the country’s first female president.
“It doesn’t really matter to me that she’s Asian,” he said.
Some Asian Americans are energized. On Wednesday, over 1,500 people — including prominent community leaders like Representative Judy Chu of California, Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, and Vanita Gupta, a former associate attorney general — joined a call of Asian American women to support the vice president, whom they called one of their own.
Among Indian Americans, there is also palpable excitement. Many Indian Americans have embraced Ms. Harris, delighting in stories she has told about her childhood visits to see relatives in Chennai and her love of Southern Indian dishes like idlis and dosas.
In the days since she announced her bid for the presidency, Indian Americans have been rushing to volunteer and donate, said Neil Makhija, president of Impact, an Indian American advocacy group. Many have also circulated a social media chant: “In Sanskrit, Kamala means ‘lotus.’ In America, it means POTUS,” or president of the United States.
Rahul Vachhani, 40, an I.T. project manager in Fairfax, Va., said that his family was so thrilled about the idea of a first Indian American and first female president that they donated $50 to Ms. Harris’s campaign as soon as she announced.
“My son used to say, ‘I’ll be the first Indian American president,’” said Mr. Vachhani, an Indian American who became an American citizen in 2016. “Maybe now he’ll be the second.”
Asian American civil rights leaders say that as vice president, Ms. Harris made it a point to ensure that Asian American voices were included in conversations around important issues like voting rights.
John C. Yang, the president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, an advocacy group in Washington, recalled that in his meetings with Ms. Harris, she talked often about ensuring language access for Asian Americans on ballots. Ms. Harris has previously spoken about the discrimination her immigrant mother faced for speaking English with a heavy accent.
Some who do not see Ms. Harris as primarily Asian American said they nevertheless felt an affinity with her because of a shared experience of being a child of immigrants — or just feeling like an outsider trying to decipher mainstream American society.
“Sometimes people don’t necessarily understand having to assimilate to American culture and how hard it is for our parents sometimes to try and assimilate to American culture,” said Malinda Un, 22, a Cambodian and Laotian American student in Seattle.
As with any group, though, the pull of representation has its limits. Like Ms. Harris, Kat Waren, 60, of Clifton, Va., was raised by a parent who was a Tamil Brahmin from Tamil Nadu, a southern state in India. She said that she felt personally connected to Ms. Harris.
“I know what she’s probably dealt with — a lot of orthodoxy, a lot of focus on education, a lot of very strict family-orientedness,” Ms. Waren said. “It makes me respect her more.”
But such similarities, Ms. Waren said, would not be relevant to her decision. While she had voted primarily for Democrats in the past, Ms. Waren said she had serious concerns about the party’s stance on issues like crime and education, and she was still making up her mind about whether to vote for Ms. Harris in November.
“I’m kind of proud to see her up there,” Ms. Waren said. “But I’m going to be looking at the issues a lot more than somebody’s ethnicity.”
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