“America, the path that led me here in recent weeks, was no doubt … unexpected. But I’m no stranger to unlikely journeys. My mother, Shyamala Harris, had one of her own … traveling from India to California, with an unshakeable dream.”
With these words, Vice-President Kamala Harris began her acceptance speech on the final night of an epic convention, embracing the unprecedented means by which she had arrived at the Democratic presidential nomination, and elevating her identity as the daughter of an immigrant mother from India.
For those of us who had never imagined that in our lifetimes we might have an Asian American president, this was a staggering moment – not least because the discourse leading up to this convention had been so badly derailed by Donald Trump’s bizarre questioning of Harris’s biracial identity. In the wake of Trump’s allegation that Harris had “only promoted her Indian heritage” in the past, until she had decided to “turn Black”, there was whispered concern from some corners of the Asian community that Harris might be forced to downplay her mother’s ancestry while reaffirming her father’s Caribbean roots.
The concern was unnecessary. Like most people of multiracial background, Harris has always been both/and, not either/or, celebrating both her Black and Asian birthrights with equal pride – and in the run-up to the convention, Black and Asian Americans have celebrated along with her.
An internet-shattering Black Women for Harris Zoom call drew 44,000 attendees and raised $1.5m in three hours. Three days later, a South Asian Women for Harris online rally, headlined by the US representative Pramila Jayapal and the actor/producer Mindy Kaling gathered a crowd of 9,000 and equaled its predecessor’s $1.5m in the same span. It paved the way for a cascade of other Asian American events, packed with energetic and enthusiastic participants such as the actor and comedian Ken Jeong, who exhorted at the online AANHPI Men for Kamala event: “This is our time – this is our moment!”
The excitement that Jeong and many fellow Asian Americans are feeling over Harris’s rise has been unmeasured. I mean that both metaphorically and literally, because when it comes to the major entities tracking the state of the election, the polls aren’t measuring it.
For decades, there’s been a term used for Asian Americans in the electoral process, and it begins with O. (No, not “Oriental”, though, yes, that too.) The term is “Other”, as in the miscellaneous bin into which pollsters cast any non-white, non-Black, and non-Latino person in their data samples, turning us into unidentified trimmings from the Democratic donkey or Republican elephant – enigmatic bulk filler for the political sausage.
Lumping us into the undifferentiated Other might have made some sense when Asian Americans were a tiny fraction of the population and an even smaller one of the electorate – say, in 1980, when Asians made up 1.5% of the US population, about 3.7 million people, and represented roughly a million registered voters.
But that was then; this is now. Asian Americans, who have consistently been the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the US over the past half-century of census tallies, now make up 6.2% of the population, or 21 million people, at least 15 million of whom are eligible to vote. That’s bigger than the national voting-eligible populations were for Latino or Black Americans in 1980, when both groups were already being broken out in voter surveys and targeted by campaigns. And in battleground states like Pennsylvania (769% growth since 1980, to 612,567) and Georgia (2,246% growth since 1980, to 610,257), the Asian population has soared, making us critical swing voters in those critical swing states. In fact, an analysis by the electoral consultant TargetSmart suggests that the entire victory margin for Joe Biden in 2020 in such states may have come from the surging Asian American vote.
Yet still today, even with the growing influence of an Asian American Democratic presidential nominee, in many major polls, Asian Americans remain “othered”.
Pollsters are quick to blame language issues (although three-quarters of Asian Americans speak proficient English, about the same rate of fluency as in the Latino population), difficulty in finding willing respondents, and a lack of culturally sensitive surveys and data tools. The reality is that, with proper investment and effort, all of these challenges can be readily addressed. The fact that they largely haven’t been comes down to a single awkward truth: Asian Americans have never in US history been seen as salient to this nation’s political discourse.
Of course, it’s an uphill battle to be seen as “politically relevant” when you’re part of the only group that’s ever been explicitly excluded from this country based on race. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited non-resident Chinese from entering the US, and 35 years later, that ban was expanded to an “Asiatic Barred Zone” that included nearly all of Asia. This exclusion was a prelude to outright hostility. Throughout the 20th century, the US would find itself in conflict with Asians, waging military campaigns against enemy forces in Japan in the 40s, Korea in the 50s, and Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, and then engaging in ugly trade wars against a resurgent Japan in the 70s and 80s and a fast-rising China in the 90s and 2000s.
Given that for most of this nation’s modern history, Asians have been excluded as undesirables or vilified as enemies, it’s hardly surprising that even after the Hart-Celler Act swung open the US’s doors to immigration in 1965, many newcomers kept their distance from politics and other professions in the spotlight – such as journalism and entertainment – and advised their offspring to do the same. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, they said. Better to be silent than scrutinized and found wanting. Better to be invisible than targeted. Those of us who pursued such professions often did so over the skepticism or condemnation of our parents.
That wasn’t the case for Kamala Harris, whose Jamaican father and Tamil Indian mother raised her within Oakland’s Black activist community and seeded her with a passion for service through the example of her maternal grandfather, PV Gopalan, a lifelong civil administrator who oversaw refugee relief in Zambia and served as joint secretary to the government of India during the 1960s. Together, they encouraged her from childhood on to step into the harsh glare of public scrutiny, and to embrace politics as a career.
And Harris’s example has resonated widely, including among others who have made similar decisions to take on jobs that make them socially visible.
At the recent Asian American Journalists Association convention in Austin, Texas, Aisha Sultan, an opinion columnist for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, shared how Harris’s ascension had “given her hope in very dark times”.
“All of us Asian American journalists who had to break into predominantly white spaces, we know what she had to go through to get here,” she said. “So we know it’s possible, and now I’m absolutely going to manifest this. I’m not going to accept anything other than President Harris.”
Sultan’s excitement was echoed by the former ABC news producer Waliya Lari, now communications director for Pillars Fund, a non-profit that seeks to build visibility for Muslim Americans. “The day after Harris became the nominee, I got very emotional,” she said. “I was thrilled to be able to tell my girls: ‘Look at that. That’s someone just like you.’ They say you can’t be what you can’t see. Well, now they’re seeing it.”
Because for those of us who have been American all along but often haven’t been perceived as such, the elevation of an Asian American president means that pollsters, political campaigns and policymakers alike will need to acknowledge that we’re Other no longer. And as Ken Jeong says, this is our moment – because the first wave in a rising tide of younger voters is finally ready and eager to see an Asian American in the Oval Office. As data pulled from the Asian American Foundation’s Staatus Index survey shows, while just 34% of Americans 65 and older and 42% of those aged 45-64 are “very comfortable” with an Asian American in the White House, a majority of those aged 16-44 say they’re ready for that to happen, and have been since Harris was elected vice-president.
You can’t be what you can’t see. But it isn’t just about seeing, it’s about being seen – and for the first time, on the biggest of possible stages, in the brightest of possible spotlights, we’re finally being seen.