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To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. In her new role, Harris will break many barriers of her own: She is the first woman, first Black person, and first person of South Asian descent to become the vice president of the United States.

But such boundary-breaking is never without strife. When Harris was nominated in August, her biracial identity prompted much discussion on social and traditional media about her background as the daughter of an Indian immigrant mother and a Jamaican immigrant father.

While some South Asian voters were upset that this part of her identity has long been downplayed, others were excited about the historic nature of her nomination and what it represents for South Asian American women and women of color. Do something. Harris has had a long career in public life: She was a San Francisco district attorney, the California attorney general, a US senator, and ran for the Democratic nomination for president last year.

And yet for years, she has primarily been identified as a Black woman in the public eye, with her South Asian identity rarely mentioned in media coverage until fairly recently.

When Harris won her Senate seat in , news coverage repeatedly highlighted that she was only the second Black woman elected to the Senate the first was Carol Moseley Braun, in But her victory that day also represented another milestone that some of those same news outlets did not mention: She was also the first South Asian American person elected to the Senate.

So she is likely to be categorized as a Black candidate. Much of society, especially white society, can look at Harris and perceive her as Black, and she will face discrimination as a result of that, regardless of which culture she might choose to identify with — and that has likely played a big role in how she views herself in the world.

In her autobiography, The Truths We Hold, Harris wrote of how her Indian mother raised her with an appreciation for Indian culture, cooking her daughters Indian food, giving them Indian jewelry, and taking them on trips abroad to visit extended family.

She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women. Harris speaks fondly of her time at Howard and often emphasizes her time there in response to critics who question her Black identity. Gopalan, a breast cancer researcher who grew up in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, graduated from college at the age of 19 and immigrated to the Bay Area in to attend graduate school at the University of California Berkeley.

There she met Donald Harris, a fellow graduate student who later became a professor of economics. Missing her terribly, but know she and the ancestors are smiling today. BidenHarris pic. The couple married and had two daughters; they divorced when Harris was 7 years old, and Harris and her sister were raised primarily by their mother.

It is the kind of family story that represents an increasingly multicultural, demographically diverse America: two immigrants from different countries who both came to the US to pursue higher education, who then raised two Black and South Asian daughters.

Pew Research estimates that 6. Americans want to be able to easily label people by race and put them into one box. Harris herself told the Washington Post in that when she entered politics, she felt pressure to define herself. Sanchez says that multiracial people can face what she refers to as double discrimination, where they experience discrimination from both communities they are members of. But Harris has also faced detractors. Maybe they need to go back to school to figure it out.

And maybe they need to learn about the African diaspora and maybe they need to learn about a number of other things. Carole Boyce-Davies, a professor of Africana studies at Cornell University, told Vox earlier this year that the pressure to choose an identity is something uniquely faced by Black Americans with immigrant families.

This is, unfortunately, a familiar situation for multiracial Americans. Over a decade ago, then-Sen. He is opening up what has been a limited perspective of who is an African American. Sanchez explained that multiracial people are often challenged on how they identify — and, as Obama and Harris have proven, will continue to be challenged.

I describe myself as a proud American. South Asian communities have their own long history with colorism and anti-Black racism. Confronting that racism should be the priority of the South Asian American community right now, especially given the current movement to expose and eliminate police violence. How Harris chooses to identify is ultimately a personal decision, and as a biracial person in America, that is undoubtedly an even more nuanced, complex issue for her to navigate.

As Ronald R. And when a woman of color runs for office, let alone a multiracial woman who identifies with two major racial groups, she carries the burden of even more expectations on her shoulders. But Harris is just one person, and she cannot be all things to all people. And now, her barrier-breaking vice presidency is also a powerful win for representation of multiracial people in America.

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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. The Kamala Harris identity debate shows how America still struggles to talk about multiracial people.

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Are Indians also Asian American? Q & A thanks to Judge Srinivasan – Data Bits – Bangladesh

 
This issue even made its way to the Presidential race: during his run for the Democratic nomination, Andrew Yang, who is of Taiwanese descent, was frequently framed by the media and his own campaign as the Asian candidate , despite his rival Kamala Harris having Indian heritage. The current territories of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan which were the core territories of the British Empire from to also form the core territories of South Asia. Fragile States Index [].