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“The racism against Black people in India and
the colorism in India is enormous and pervasive
throughout the country, including in Tamil
Nadu,” she explains. And yet he not only accepted
but embraced his granddaughters, proud Black
American women.On the day of George Floyd’s first funeral service,
Harris gave an impassioned speech on the Senate
floor. Senator Rand Paul had just held up the anti-
lynching bill she had introduced with Senators
Cory Booker and Tim Scott, the only other Black
members of the Senate, and she stood to take issue
with this affront. “It should not require a maim-
ing or torture in order for us to recognize a lynch-
ing when we see it and recognize it by federal law
and call it what it is, which is that it is a crime that
should be punishable with accountability and con-
sequence,” she said. “So it is remarkable and it is
painful to be standing here right now, especially
when people of all races are marching in the streets
of America, outraged by the hate and the violence
and the murder that has been fueled by racism
during the span of this country’s life.”
Her speech, in which she quoted anti-lynching
pioneer Ida B. Wells, also drew on her history. As a
student at Howard, a historically Black university,
Harris joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Black
Greek sorority. AKA was started in 1908 by Ethel
Hedgeman, and from the outset, the sisters believed
it was their duty to “raise up Negroes.” In the 1930s,
they started both an education program and a
rural health program in Mississippi. In the early
20th century, one of the sorority’s projects was
pushing anti-lynching legislation. After around 200
attempts, which ceased in the 1960s, legislation did
not pass in Congress. Nearly 60 years later, Harris
joined Booker and Scott in picking up the mantle
by co-authoring the Justice for Victims of Lynching
Act, which was later renamed the Emmett Till
Antilynching Act. And in doing so, Harris continued
the tradition of Black women working for the
betterment of all humankind.
These are just a few examples of how ex-
amining Harris’ specific experiences and
relationships— different from those of the past
and present occupants of high office—may yield
a deeper understanding of the woman who just
made history. But they are a reminder that the
U.S. will not only have its first Vice President who
is a Black and Indian-American woman, as impor-
tant as those milestones are. Harris is standing on
a firm foundation of service, courage, struggle,
passion, intellectual rigor and hope. She is indeed
ready to go to work.Smith is an award-winning playwright, actor and
NYU professorHarris writes in her memoir The Truths We
Hold that her mother, who grew up in the Indian
state of Tamil Nadu, “understood very well that
she was raising two black daughters.” Harris’
now well-worn narrative includes little about her
father, who moved to the U.S. from Jamaica and
acquired a Ph.D. in economics from the University
of California, Berkeley. Shyamala Gopalan and
Donald Harris fell in love as civil rights activists and
divorced when the future VP was 7, and Gopalan
got custody of Harris and her sister Maya. Harris
mentions spending summers with her father in Palo
Alto, Calif., where he became a tenured professor
of economics at Stanford in the 1970s, no small
feat for a Black man. “The Farm,” the “Harvard of
the West,” still had only a handful of Black faculty
when I became tenured there in the ’90s—I cannot
imagine what it would have been like to be Black
and on the tenure track in the ’70s.
But it is her mother, a noted cancer researcher,
who is frequently evoked as Harris’ influence and
inspiration. “When she came here from India at
the age of 19, she maybe didn’t quite imagine this
moment,” Harris said in her victory speech on
No v. 7. “But she believed so deeply in an America
where a moment like this is possible.” And that she
came at all is thanks largely to Harris’ grandfather
P.V. Gopalan, a civil servant in India. The history of
South Asian activists’ struggle for independence is
rich and the movement’s solidarity with the fight
for civil rights in the U.S. runs deep; Harris has
talked of walking the beaches of Besant Nagar with
her grandfather, her pen pal in those aerogram
pre-email days, and being inspired as a girl by
the passion he had for democracy. Still, it’s worth
noting that although Harris is “for the people,”
she is not “of the people.” When we speak of her
as the first Indian-American Vice President of the
United States, we should also acknowledge that
she comes into this position with at least some
level of privilege. Her family is Brahman, the most
elite caste in India.
Harris is a highly educated and accomplished
woman, but she is hardly the only one in her family.
In an interview with an Indian newscaster after the
election, Dr. Sarala Gopalan, Harris’ aunt, or chitti,
explained that sending Shyamala to the U.S. was not
something you would expect from a South Indian in
- But their father believed that women should
be educated. “When she became a Senator, I went
and told her, ‘Kamala, you are a diamond in the
family,’” said Sarala Gopalan, a gynecologist, “and
she just said to me, ‘Chitti, I am not a diamond, I am
a diamond amongst diamonds in the family.’ ”
Dr. Radhika Balakrishnan, faculty director
of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at
Rutgers University, points to another sign of how
progressive Harris’ grandfather must have been.