Kamala Harris And The Poverty of Identity Politics

What the nomination of Kamala Devi Harris by the Democratic party to the Vice-Presidency of the US signifies is the sheer impossibility of escaping the identity question in American public life.

US Democratic vice presidential nominee and Senator from California, Kamala Harris. (Image: AFP)

There can be little doubt that in choosing Kamala Harris as his running mate, Joe Biden was moved preeminently by considerations of identity politics. The choice of a Vice President has always been viewed as a balancing act, and Biden could not have been impervious to the desirability of having a woman on the ticket. If he is the past of the party, she is its future; if he is old, she is reasonably young; if he appears shopworn, even dull, she sparkles with energy—and more; if he is from the East Coast, she is from the West Coast. But, as everyone recognizes, there is something more pointed in Biden’s selection of Harris, who has been a prolific trailblazer in being the first black American, the first Indian American, and the first woman elected as the District Attorney of San Francisco and later as the Attorney General of California, and now sits in the US Senate as the first Indian American. She is the first woman of color to join the presidential ticket of the country’s two major political parties. Harris has chalked up many other achievements to her credit but it is scarcely necessary to enumerate them since her qualifications to serve as Vice President are not in doubt—qualifications that impress all the more in view of the fact that the incumbent President is singularly ill-qualified in every respect, unless chicanery, deceit, mendaciousness, and pure narcissism are qualities that merit respect or advancement in life. However, it is necessary to qualify my own claim of Harris’s qualifications at once with the observation that these are only qualifications in the nominal sense of the term, and do not suggest at all suggest that she is necessarily a person of elevated moral standing or somehow possessed of unusual intellectual perspicacity. Moreover, the brute fact is that it is not as holder of various offices that Kamala Harris is being assessed today, but rather (in the language that has become commonsense in America) as a “woman of color”, and as someone who is part Indian American and part African American. It is not surprising that, barring some predictable and often lengthy inquiries into Harris’s record as a prosecutor and ‘top cop’ of the wealthiest state of the union, the opinion pieces have revolved around the question of identity. Does she ‘identify’ herself predominantly as Black and only take recourse to her Indian identity when the occasion seems fitting? Is Harris likely to become more Black as the campaigning intensifies, if only because she is astute enough to recognize that, however much she may feel beholden to her partial Indian ancestry, Black people will indubitably have a far greater role in determining her future in American politics? Indians number in the vicinity of around 4 million, around 1.25 percent of the American population; Blacks, on the other hand, make up close to 14 percent of the country. But their numbers belie the strengths that Indian Americans bring, in principle, to the Democratic campaign—the advantages of education and affluence. Some are consequently asking: will Harris selectively play up her Indianness as she courts voters and donors in the affluent Indian American community? Or, to put forward another possibility, might Harris present herself as equally Black American and Indian American, as someone who, in the last analysis, counts herself only as American? Her position, to take one illustration, on US policy towards Israel, of which Kamala Harris is a very keen supporter, suggests that she will act as any other American might and that neither her Indian nor her African ancestry will have any bearing on her politics. It would not be too much to say that generally people of color who have risen to high office in the US—Colin Powell, Condeleezza Rice, and most eminently Barack Obama—comport, in much of their thinking and certainly in matters of policy, with white establishment Americans. Those who do not recognize the manner in which identity politics dominates nearly all conversation in America understand little if anything of America. What the nomination of Kamala Devi Harris by the Democratic party to the Vice-Presidency of the US signifies is the sheer impossibility of escaping the identity question in American public life. Let us consider her, in the first instance, as an African American. Her mother came to the US as a foreign student from India; her father, likewise, is an immigrant of Jamaican origins, and the two met as students at Berkeley and as political dissidents who became involved in the civil rights movement and the agitations calling for the support of liberation movements in “the developing world”. Irreconcilable differences led her parents to separate when Kamala was but five years old and it is her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who then raised Kamala and her younger sister Maya. Kamala says in her autobiography that her mother did not, however, feel isolated since the black community had in a fashion adopted her, and that her mother in turn raised the two young girls as black children: “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as two black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” It is but natural that, since her mother raised her, that Kamala should have felt closer to her than to her father, and she may also have felt inspired by her mother’s grit, resilience, and achievements. Her mother not only went on to earn a doctorate in endocrinology but became a cancer researcher. Nevertheless, Kamala Harris has identified herself as Black American far more often than as Indian American; at the same time, her father, of whom she speaks with warmth, has been erased from most of her public speeches. At the recently concluded Democratic National Convention, where she gave her nomination acceptance speech, Kamala Harris spoke movingly of her mother—and yet her father did not even merit a mention. This is all the more unfortunate because a preponderant number of white people, and a large majority of Indian Americans, are convinced that black men are incapable of exercising ‘responsibility’ and that as fathers they are particularly derelict in the performance of their duties. From all the available evidence, it appears that Donald Harris was a good father to his two daughters. We might, however, also try to interrogate Kamala Harris’s apparent self-identification as an African American from an altogether different angle: where does Africa belong in her political and moral imagination and her discursive world? The question assumes all the more importance at this present juncture, given the force, velocity, and urgency with which “Black Lives Matter” has become part of the national conversation with reverberations elsewhere in the world. Oddly, as some reflection on “Black Lives Matter” suggests, the movement has little to say about lives in Africa; and the continent scarcely figures in her autobiography. Indeed, judging from what transpired from the eight years of Obama’s presidency, there is little if any reason to think that his term in office had any long-lasting implications for Africa. Obama was committed to weaning Africa from its dependence on aid, and, as a person of pronounced neo-liberal views, was hopeful that he could get Africans more interested in engaging with the world with commitments to business models. If one were asked to describe whether the eight years of the presidency of an African American meant something tangible for Africa, one would have to reply in the negative. What of Kamala Harris’s Indian American origins? Some Hindi-language newspapers erupted with joy at the announcement of her nomination, as though she had been nominated to fight an election in India; others commented, in language that can only be viewed as comical, on the Indian lotus (kamal) that also blooms overseas. There are the usual speculations about what a Biden presidency, one in which the younger, energetic, and ‘dynamic’ Kamala Harris is expected to play a far more aggressive role than what is ordinarily reserved for Vice Presidents, may portend for India-US relations. If some would like to think that Harris’ Indian roots will incline her to push her boss to grant India more favorable terms of trade, encourage closer India-US relations in an effort to thwart China’s advance, and overlook some of the more authoritarian features of the present Indian administration, others have to the contrary argued that Harris is, to use a colloquialism, ‘a tough cookie’ who is likely to question India’s intentions with regards to Kashmir and lodge strong protests whenever it appears that the rights of minorities are being violated. All of this is mere chatter. Among Indian Americans, the principal consideration is what having Harris at the near helm of politics might mean for the future of the community in politics. Indian Americans long complained of being invisible in the US, and the feeling persists among many of them that Hinduism is slighted in comparison to other religions. Her rise is obviously a matter of pride to most Indian Americans, especially women, but it is wholly characteristic of the intellectual parochialism of the community that almost no one has taken Harris’ ascendancy as an opportunity to revisit the rich, largely unknown, and sometimes troubled history of Indian-Black relations in the US. Such a narrative would encompass, for example, the unusual history of what the scholar Vivek Bald has called ‘Bengali Harlem’, a portrait of Indian peddlers, lascars, and other working-class men who struck up long-term relationships, sometimes leading to marriage, with Black, Puerto Rican, and Creole women in cities stretching from the East Coast across to the Midwest and the American South in the early part of the 20th century. On a less rarified and optimistic note, the history of Indian-Black relationships in the US must surely have to contend with the general tendency among Indian American to disavow the company of Africa Americans, the history of attempts by Indians to pass as whites, and the adoption by an overwhelming number of Indian Americans of all of white America’s highly jaundiced conceptions of Black America. Whatever the promise of Kamala Harris’s nomination, there are at least three reasons to doubt that her ascendancy will lead to any fundamental changes. First, she belongs to a breed of professional politicians who play to win and whose careers have been shaped by the well-oiled machinery of political manipulation, grandstanding, and the like. Both Donald J. Trump and his daughter Ivanka contributed money in 2011 and 2013 to her election campaign when she was running for the state Attorney General. Contemporary electoral politics in a democracy has been reduced to animal politics. The candidate, as such, is nearly irrelevant—perhaps an odd argument to make at this juncture, some would argue, considering the apparently ‘life-defining’ choice that people are called upon to make this November, though in my memory every four years the same argument has been advanced over the course of the last three decades. Secondly, Kamala Harris’s ascendancy is far less the sign of any substantive shift in American politics than a form of gestural accommodation that democracies are called upon to make these days. It is now perfectly well understood that some shifts are irreversible and must therefore be accepted in good taste, so long as some fundamentals—class hierarchies, a belief in the spirit of American capitalism, and the supposition that the US is the one ‘indispensable nation’, to name just a few—are left undisputed. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the decision this summer of the US Supreme Court in a case where Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, whose nomination to the court was bitterly contested by liberals and who had been roundly condemned by them as ‘extremely conservative’, surprised everyone by writing the court’s landmark decision extending civil rights protections to LGBTQ employees nationwide. Opposition to gay marriage and to gays serving in the military went the same way as opposition to women serving in the army, and both Gorsuch’s seeming capitulation to the moment and Harris’s rise must be viewed in the same vein—as harbinger of the kind of incremental changes that permit a democracy to call itself a democracy. Kamala Harris is not even remotely a threat to the establishment, and one must not forget for a moment that what is being argued on her behalf—her part Indian American identity, or the familiar story of her immigrant parents from two different countries finding success in the US—also holds true for Nikki Haley, another very prominent Indian American woman who is most likely poised to compete for the presidency of the US in the near future. It was quite a sight to see Haley address the Republican National Convention by describing how her immigrant Punjabi mother, dressed in a sari, and her turbaned father, together realized ‘the American dream’. Thirdly, it cannot be stressed enough that a more capacious and particularly ethical perspective on politics behooves us to liberate ourselves from procrustean notions of identity rather than becoming entrenched in them. It cannot be doubted that there will already be rather silly articles by Indian Americans about Harris as the ‘desi alpha female’ and other sentimental pronouncements about how her nomination is a ‘dream come true’. The trouble with identity is that it is a crushingly boring subject. “Nothing seems less interesting”, the prominent intellectual Edward Said wrote with characteristic forthrightness, “than the narcissistic self-study that today passes in many places for identity politics, or ethnic studies, or affirmations of roots, cultural pride, drum-beating nationalism, and so on.” When will we get past the fact that Kamala Harris is a woman, in equal parts African American and Indian American, and begin to pose substantive questions about ethics, political conduct, the place of conscience in politics, the tensions between state power and individual autonomy, and so on? What is the point of claiming ‘minority’ status or being a trailblazer if one cannot move past the travesty of identity politics and demonstrate in one’s own praxis a far more ethical politics? It is clear that in the present state of senescence that characterizes democracy in the United States of America, one should not expect much of Kamala Devi Harris—or indeed almost any other candidate. (Vinay Lal is a writer, blogger, cultural critic, and Professor of History at UCLA) Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs and views expressed by the various authors and forum participants on this website are personal and do not reflect the opinions, beliefs and views of ABP News Network Pvt Ltd.