Harris' Identity Shows The Limits Of Race Labels

Presidential elections, for better or for worse, spark wide-ranging conversations about race. And Harris, who is both Black and Asian American, possesses an identity so multifaceted that it threatens to make that conversation a little bit smarter

- Frank Shyong

It was just the Tamil word for auntie, two syllables in a speech by Kamala Harris last Thursday that covered her childhood, heritage and political awakening and culminated in her acceptance of the Democratic Party nomination for vice president.

But “chithi,” uttered on a presidential stage for the first time and pronounced correctly at that, set millions of WhatsApp chats ablaze around the world. A photo of a young Kamala and her sister Maya in saris and bindis with their grandparents in India circulated furiously. Nationalistic pride, political optimism and representational joy combined in a celebratory moment that was largely absent when Harris announced her presidential candidacy last year.

For a moment, a lot of us contemplated the idea of a vice president — someday, maybe even a president — shaped by the sacrifice of immigrant parents, who might feel the pain and injustice of country-specific travel bans in their own family, or have some sense of what it’s like to sip coffee from a Starbucks cup with someone else’s simpler-to-spell name on it.

Even I felt my own cynicism fading ever so slightly. Presidential elections, for better or for worse, spark wide-ranging conversations about race. And Harris, an Oakland, California-born daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, who is both Black and Asian American, possesses an identity so multifaceted that it threatens to make that conversation a little bit smarter.

But presidential elections, for those accustomed to discussing race intelligently, can also be unfortunate markers of how little progress we have made.