Column
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September 4, 2024
But as each JD Vance and Kamala Harris wrestle to introduce their South Asian households to the broader tradition, America’s “Passage to India” stays beset by racism and backlash.
The completion in 1869 of the Suez Canal, one of many nice engineering feats in human historical past, crammed Walt Whitman with surprise not solely on the scientific accomplishment, but additionally the cultural and religious prospects that he noticed the canal opening up. For Whitman, the canal presaged not simply extra colonial commerce however one thing extra hopeful: the start of a brand new international tradition that may convey the Americas and Europe nearer to Africa and Asia for a religious change amongst equals, one that may additionally deepen private connections between the peoples of the world.
Whitman gave expression to those hopes in his poem “A Passage to India” (1871), the place the good rhapsodist of democracy foresaw
The earth to be spann’d, related by community,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant introduced close to,
The lands to be welded collectively.
Was Whitman being hopelessly utopian? The globalization that he intuited has been characterised extra usually by imperialism and xenophobia than by the bringing collectively of the human household.
But within the 2024 election marketing campaign, we are able to discover proof that Whitman’s imagined passage to India is coming true. Kamala Harris is half-Indian and half-Black: Her mom, Shyamala Gopalan, a biomedical scientist, was born in Chennai (previously Madras), India, in 1938; her father, Donald Harris, an economist, was born in Brown’s City, Jamaica, that very same yr. Donald Trump’s operating mate, JD Vance, is married to Usha Chilukuri Vance, whose mother and father emigrated to america from Andhra Pradesh, India, within the late Nineteen Seventies.
In introducing her husband on the Republican Nationwide Conference, Usha Vance winningly spoke of how, when she first dated Vance, he “tailored to my vegetarian weight loss program and discovered to prepare dinner meals from my mom, Indian meals. Earlier than I knew it, he’d grow to be an integral a part of my household.” On different events, although, Usha has been extra cagey about her background. She is a working towards Hindu, and her marriage ceremony with Vance featured each Christian and Hindu rituals. The identical inclusiveness might be seen elsewhere on the RNC, when Trump supporter Harmeet Dhillon sang a Sikh prayer in Punjabi.
As I famous in a canopy story for The Nation in February, Indian People—who’ve usually been marginalized in and at occasions even excluded from america on racist grounds—at the moment are surging to public prominence. Apart from Harris and Usha Vance, different high-profile Indian People in politics embody the entrepreneur turned presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, and Pramila Jayapal, head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Past politics, Indian People have grow to be more and more seen in journalism, literature, the academy, and large enterprise. They’re now arguably essentially the most profitable ethnic group in America.
Present Situation
However the rise of Indian People isn’t a narrative of unalloyed success. Racism and backlash are a part of the story, emboldened by JD Vance’s operating mate, Donald Trump.
The white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who gained prominence after eating with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022, condemned each Dhillon’s prayer and Vance’s marriage to Usha. Denouncing the Vance household, Fuentes mentioned, “Do we actually count on that the man who has an Indian spouse and named their child Vivek goes to assist white id?”
JD Vance had already failed an earlier Fuentes check. The New York Instances reviews that Vance earned Trump’s belief and stayed on the quick listing to be his operating mate when he stored quiet about Trump’s assembly with Fuentes (in contrast to different Republicans, who expressed displeasure).
In an interview with Megyn Kelly, Vance gave a lower than stirring protection of his household from Fuentes. Vance mentioned, “Look, I like my spouse a lot. I like her as a result of she’s who she is. Clearly, she’s not a white individual, and we’ve been accused, attacked by some white supremacists over that. However I simply… I like Usha.” Even when we make allowances for the truth that Vance is an ungainly speaker, it’s onerous to not discover that he isn’t actually denouncing racism right here. The phrases “clearly” and “however” sound odd. The implication is that Usha, though clearly not white, ought to be given particular dispensation due to Vance’s love. This all needs to be coupled with Vance’s nativist politics, which gives immigration restriction as an answer to issues such because the housing scarcity.
On July 31, Trump, talking to the Nationwide Affiliation of Black Journalists, mentioned that Harris “was all the time of Indian heritage and she or he was solely selling Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black till quite a lot of years in the past when she occurred to show Black. And now she needs to be often called Black. So I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black?”
It is a typical Trumpian travesty of a fancy actuality. Kamala Harris is each Indian and Black. Even after divorcing Donald Harris when Kamala was younger, her mom was energetic within the Black neighborhood in Berkeley, which adopted the one mom and her two daughters. Harris’s Blackness is a matter of tradition and upbringing as properly biology. That’s a actuality that’s maybe too difficult for the likes of Donald Trump—however it’s the multicultural actuality that thousands and thousands of People stay with. JD Vance himself embodies the complexity of the multicultural second: a toddler of a working-class white household and a convert to Catholicism, married to a Hindu Brahman whose household has been distinguished in India for hundreds of years. However these are realities Vance can’t readily clarify to the racists in his personal social gathering.
America’s passage to India stays tough, and may but require a genius on the extent of Whitman to be totally comprehended by the American folks.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Writer, The Nation
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