American Lotus

Vishwas R. Gaitonde
23 min readSep 5, 2024

The Cultural Strengths of Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris’ story which spans cultures is quintessentially American

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know ̶ Is she Indian? Or is she Black?”

These were Donald Trump’s caustic words about Kamala Harris at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention on July 31. It was a calculated remark. While many in the Black and Indian-American communities accept her dual heritage, some don’t, seeing in her too much of one ethnicity, not enough of the other. Trump was driving the wedge further.

When Biden picked Harris as his running mate in 2020, her maternal uncle Balachandran “Balu” Gopalan anticipated attacks from Trump. But he was confident that his feisty niece, the daughter of his equally gutsy sister, would not take Trump’s pangas (ego-fueled tantrums) lying down. In this instance, Harris denied Trump the oxygen he craved. She did not directly counter this panga, addressing it indirectly while speaking to the black sorority Sigma Gamma Rho in Houston: “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us — they are an essential source of our strength.”

Bi/multiracial people have long been targets, from being suspected of passing off as White under the Jim Crow practices to accused of not espousing one’s “race” enough. Kamala Harris has faced these kinds of hits all her life. If you have a dual heritage, it is well nigh impossible to be both in exact equal measure. You have a primary identity even as you embrace both. For historic reasons (which I shall touch upon later), the Black experience, not the Indian one, is central to American life. Harris primarily identifies as Black but over time has struck a fine balance in also bringing her Indian identity into play.

And it starts with her name.

Flower Power, Woman Power

Kamala means lotus. India’s national flower blooms in slow moving rivers, lakes, and ponds. Its roots are mired in the mud, the long stem snakes out of the water, the leaves floating on the surface or, like the blossom, held above it. Arising from the muck but unsullied by it, the lotus symbolizes purity. Lotus seeds can stay viable for over a thousand years, so the lotus symbolizes longevity and reincarnation.

In Hinduism, the lotus represents spiritual enlightenment. Many Hindu deities are depicted holding a lotus. Indeed, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity (and peace, necessary for prosperity) stands or sits atop a full-bloomed lotus.

Harris’ middle name is Devi. Kamala Devi (Lotus Goddess) refers to Lakshmi. But Devi as a standalone name refers to the Hindu Mother Goddess, the source of feminine power, a primordial Wonder Woman. Devi is often portrayed riding a tiger or a lion, a celestial Cat Lady with the power to vanquish demonic opponents. Harris’ mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris told the Los Angeles Times in 2004 that she chose ‘Devi’ for an auspicious reason: “A culture that worships goddesses produces strong women.”

To help people pronounce her name, Harris offered the mnemonic “Comma-La.” But ‘comma’ is pronounced in different ways in different parts of the world. “COME-UH-LA” with equal stress on the three syllables best matches the Indian pronunciation.

How to say “Kamala” the right way

Shyamala’s daughter

“You can’t know who Kamala Harris is without knowing who our mother was,” tweeted her sister Maya Harris. Her uncle Balachandran Gopalan said that, without taking anything away from Kamala, his sister Shyamala was the real trailblazer. And in her autobiography The Truths We Hold Kamala Harris declared, “I carry her with me wherever I go…And there is no title or honor on earth I’ll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris’s daughter. That is the truth I hold dearest of all.”

Shyamala was the daughter of Painganadu Venkataraman Gopalan (P.V. Gopalan), the eldest of four children, all high achievers, unconventional in their own ways. After Shyamala came a son, Balachandran (“Balu”), educated at Imperial College, London, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison who, following a distinguished academic career in economics and computer science, now lives in Delhi. Two daughters followed: Sarala, a gynecologist, retired and living in Madras, and Mahalakshmi (“Chinni”) Subash, an information scientist who lives in Toronto, Canada.

Kamala married Douglas Emhoff, a Jewish White man; her sister Maya wed Tony West, an African American, and Maya’s daughter Meenakshi (Meena) wed Nikolas Ajagu, a Nigerian American. Balachandran married a Mexican, Rosamaria Orihuela, and their Indo-Mexican daughter, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela, is an English professor at the University of Maryland. Kamala’s stepchildren Cole and Ella Emhoff call her “Momala,” an amalgam of Mom and Kamala, which sounds very like the Yiddish term of endearment mamaleh, Little Mother.

Harris has regular contact with her Indian relations. She calls her aunts ‘chitti’ (Tamil for mother’s younger sister.) They attend landmark events like her Senate swearing-in ceremony. They had prime seats at the DNC when Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination. Uncle Balu, visiting from India, had dinner with Harris the night before Biden quit the race and endorsed her. Harris had no idea that it was coming.

This family, as we have seen, is diverse, eclectic, and international, qualities that guided Shyamala Gopalan as she left India for the United States at age 19 to study endocrinology at the University of California at Berkeley. She applied on her own through the U.S embassy in Delhi, obtained a Fulbright scholarship, and presented the fait accompli to her father. It was a huge deal in the 1950s. Air travel was just beginning. Most households in India did not have phones, and international calls were expensive. For a young unmarried girl to journey alone to the other side of the world where she knew not a soul was daunting.

Berkeley was a microcosm of the Civil Rights movement roiling the country. Most Indian students avoided campus politics especially when the issues were not about India. But the woman who later would name her daughter ‘Devi’ did not hold back. She attended the talk by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a man who in turn was inspired by her country’s leader, Mahatma Gandhi. But more than King, she was impressed by a Jamaican doctoral student, Donald Harris, who spoke of how Whites in colonial Jamaica nurtured a group of Black “elites” to further their aims and maintain social inequality. She was intrigued: her father had worked in the civil service in British India. After the talk, she — all five feet of her, dressed in sari and sandals, “a standout in appearance,” as Donald Harris later said — peppered the tall speaker with questions.

They subsequently spent much time together and eventually married. Gopalan was to return to India after graduation to an arranged marriage, more challenging now should her educational qualifications be better than those of her suitors’. By choosing Harris, she blazed her own trail yet again.

Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris in Oakland, California, early 1960s. (Photo via The San Francisco Chronicle)

In the millennia-old Hindu caste system the Gopalans were Brahmins, the highest caste. In her autobiography, Kamala Harris says this of her grandmother Rajam: “…she was a skilled community organizer. She would take in women who were being abused by their husbands, and then she’d call the husbands and tell them they’d better shape up or she would take care of them.” A woman in her day could not do something like this unless she had privilege. But whereas high caste people wield their privilege to dominate the lower castes in nefarious ways, the Gopalans used it fairly.

And they were tested. Their daughter marrying out of caste was one thing. But a black man, a Jamaican, somebody they had never met and knew nothing about? In the early 1960s, for Indian parents to bless this union was truly astounding.

However, a shared love of civil rights and justice alone cannot cement a marriage; differences surfaced. Although they still loved each other very much, Harris wrote in her autobiography, they had become like oil and water. It was hard on both of them, Harris continued, but for her mother the divorce was a kind of failure she had never considered.

In her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson describes the American caste system which began in 1619 when the first Africans arrived in Virginia and a distinction was made on who could be enslaved for life and who could not. English and Irish indentured servants were granted more privileges than Africans who worked alongside them. Europeans now had a new identity, White, and its diametrical opposite was Black.

This caste system was predicated on race, dividing those whose appearance enabled them to claim pure Caucasian ancestry from those whose appearance indicated that some or all their forebears were Negroes. Its offshoot was the doctrine of White supremacy. Like the Indian caste system, the American caste system is premeditated to stigmatize the lower castes to justify the dehumanization that keeps them at the bottom for perpetuity. In America, what people look like and the race they are perceived to belong to is the palpable indicator of their caste.

What a titanic fall for Shyamala Gopalan, from the pinnacle of one caste system to the bottom of the other. She realized that in America, even one drop of “Negro blood” categorized you as Black. In her autobiography, Harris wrote: “She knew her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”

In the early 1960s, there were only 12,000 Indian immigrants living in the United States. In 1924, the eugenics-inspired Immigration Act which completely prohibited immigration from Asia had been signed the into law by President Calvin Coolidge, who remarked, “America must remain American” (code for White). Asians who had previously entered could stay but were ineligible for American citizenship; neither could they marry Whites. The law remained in force for 28 years until the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 eliminated racial restrictions in immigration and naturalization statutes.

Kamala Harris with her ‘second mother’ Regina Shelton (Photo via Kamala Harris’ Facebook page)

Shyamala Gopalan Harris took the lack of an Indian community in stride; the Black community welcomed her. The Afro-American Association of Berkeley was a Black intellectual study group that seeded the Black power movement; Huey Newton, who would go on to co-found the Black Panthers, was a member. The group restricted membership to those of African descent. The sole exception: Shyamala Gopalan Harris.

“These were my mother’s people,” Harris wrote in her autobiography. “In a country where she had no family, they were her family — and she was theirs. From almost the moment she arrived from India she chose and was welcome to and enveloped in the Black community. It was the foundation of her new American life.”

The Harrises lived in an apartment above Regina Shelton, a spirited African-American lady from Louisiana, the matriarch of the neighborhood. Kamala and Maya would spend time there after school until their mother returned from work. On Sundays, their mother dressed them in their Sunday best and sent them to church, the Twenty-third Avenue Church of God, a Black Baptist church, where they sang in the children’s choir. Regina Shelton, who was also their Sunday School teacher, taught the girls Black culture, Black identity, and the joys of soul food — stewed okra and tomatoes, gumbo, red beans and rice.

Harris took the oath of office as Attorney General of California and as Senator on Mrs. Shelton’s Bible; for Vice President, she additionally used Justice Thurgood Marshall’s Bible.

A Baptist rooted in her faith, Harris’ vision, built from her multicultural background, is both ecumenical and interfaith, giving her a means to navigate through contemporary multi-faith America. When she runs for office, her aunt in Madras, Sarala Gopalan, breaks coconuts at her local Pillaiyar temple.

Gopalan Harris was a trained singer of Carnatic music (South Indian classical music) but there were limited opportunities to perform, barring the occasional Indian cultural event in San Francisco. She sang a different music: gospel, and she sang with heart, soul, and voice. Donald Harris had an extensive collection of jazz albums and the music of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Thelonius Monk would fill the house. When she cooked, Gopalan Harris played Aretha Franklin. Harris remembers a song that was a perennial favorite: “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.”

Her Indian mother taught Kamala Harris a thing or two about Black culture.

Harris also learnt from observation. Immigrants of color had to perform twice as well to be considered half as good. Her mother encountered this all the time but her mantra was: if there was something wrong, don’t complain, do something about it. Because she was short and had an accent, she was often considered unintelligent. At one time, when she was passed over for a promotion, her response was to resign and take up a better job though it meant moving to Montreal, Canada.

Kamala Harris with her friends at Howard University (Photo courtesy of Karen Gibbs)

Harris attended Howard University, a historically Black university, and joined its Black Greek sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, at exactly the time when Howard laid the foundation for a plethora of high-achieving, graduates from Pulitzer Prize winners to MacArthur Genius Grant recipients to Oscar nominees, network anchors, entrepreneurs, and scholars. Howard was to Kamala what Berkeley had been to her mother, and the influence of Black culture was strong during her formative years.

Tragedy struck in 2008. Shyamala Gopalan Harris, the dedicated cancer researcher herself contracted colon cancer. Harris described the day the news broke as “one of the worst days of my life.”

Kamala Harris speaks of the day she discovered her mother had cancer

Harris, at the time District Attorney of San Francisco, was running for Attorney General of California. She put in as much quality time with her mother as she could, and many friends helped out. Her maternal uncle “Balu” Gopalan came over from India in 2009 and spent three months with his sister. Barely two days after he returned to India, Harris phoned him. His sister was asking for him urgently, so he came back. Shyamala wished to return to India to the care of her doctor sister Sarala. It was not to be.

Per Hindu custom, after cremation the ashes are immersed in running water. With a heavy heart Kamala Harris immersed her mother’s ashes in the Bay of Bengal at Elliot’s Beach in Madras, the beach where as a girl she had taken morning walks with her grandfather.

P.V. Gopalan’s grand-daughter

Madras is a bustling metropolis on the southeast coast of India, capital of the state of Tamil Nadu. I grew up in its Kilpauk subdivision. Madras has two beaches — the sprawling Marina Beach, and Elliot’s Beach, a smaller beach in the city’s upscale Besant Nagar subdivision. Those days Elliot’s was the quieter, less crowded beach, where one better enjoyed the sea and sand. I usually went to the Marina, but sometime to Elliot’s.

During those years, a little girl called Kamala Harris walked down Elliot’s Beach with her grandfather. Even had I passed them, I would not have known it. Shyamala would bring her daughters on vacation to the Gopalan family home in Besant Nagar. P.V. Gopalan, now retired, who Harris described as one of her most favorite people in the world, took her on his morning walks on Elliot’s Beach which, in British India, had been exclusive to Whites. Ironically, the beach named after White imperialist Edward Elliot lies in the city subdivision named after Annie Besant, an Englishwoman who battled for India’s independence from her country. This was where Kamala Harris was motivated to pursue public service.

“My grandparents were phenomenal,” Harris recollected. “We would go to India like, every other year. My grandfather fought for and was a defender of the freedom of India…Being the eldest grandchild, my grandfather would take me on his morning walk. All of his buddies who were also great leaders would talk about the importance of fighting for democracy, and the importance of fighting for civil rights and that people would be treated equally regardless of where they were born or the circumstances of their birth. Those walks along the beach in India really planted something in my mind and created a commitment in me before I even realized it, that has led me to where I am today.”

How Kamala Harris became inspired to take up a life of public service

Harris will not recognize the beach today. Overcrowded and overdeveloped, the entire beachfront is dotted with garish restaurants, houses, and high-rise buildings. Elliot is fading from memory; locals call the beach the Bessie.

In 1966, the government of India sent P.V. Gopalan to help newly independent Zambia’s first president Kenneth Kaunda manage the influx of refugees from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Harris spent time with her grandfather in Lusaka, also getting acquainted with the land of her father’s ancestors. On a visit to Zambia as vice president, she visited the site where her grandfather had lived; the house no longer stands.

Until his death in 1998 P.V. Gopalan inspired Harris through letters; the two corresponded regularly, sharing and discussing nuggets of wisdom.

The family at their Besant Nagar residence. Back row (L-R), Kamala Harris, Rajam Gopalan, P.V. Gopalan, Maya Harris. Front Row (L-R): Meena Harris, Sharada Balachandran Orihuela. [Image via Voice of America]

Shades of India

“We were raised with a strong awareness of and appreciation for Indian culture,” Harris wrote in her autobiography. “All of my mother’s words of affection or frustration came out in her mother tongue [Tamil] — which seems fitting to me, since the purity of those emotions is what I associate with my mother most of all.” On her India visits, Harris occasionally wore saris at family functions and spoke a little Tamil with relatives. However, she has not learnt Tamil.

When Senator Harris was running for president, she posted a video of her preparing masala dosa, a South Indian breakfast item, with actor Mindy Kaling (born Vera Mindy Chockalingam). They talked about their Indian Tamil heritage while cooking.

Kamala Harris and Mindy Kaling discuss Indian culture while cooking masala dosa.

Harris was conversant with many aspects of Indian culture (“Just don’t call me Auntie!”) but was off the mark in others — for instance, she remarked that South Indian cuisine is vegetarian. Meat eating is prevalent in the southern states; however, Brahmins are vegetarians, so Harris ate vegetarian food at her grandfather’s home. As she remarked, her grandmother’s dictum was that if it had a mother, it would not be eaten.

Starting anew in her new country, Shyamala cast aside past dietary restrictions. Why be burdened by what had been — the restrictions of the old life? She cooked oyster beef stir fry and bacon-fried apples (which Harris cooks using her mother’s recipes). She cooked okra the Indian way with turmeric and mustard seeds and the Jamaican way with shrimp and sausage.

The four highlighted images: Front row, L to R — Maya Harris, Kamala Harris, cousin Sherman Harris; Back row — Oscar Harris (Photo via Sherman Harris)

Donald Harris’ daughter

As Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan were courting, America was encountering new music from the Caribbean. Jamaican-American Harry Belafonte swept the nation with his calypso hits such as Day-O (Banana Boat Song), Jamaican Farewell, and Island in the Sun. And as Americans delved into calypso, Kamala and Maya Harris explored Jamaica on vacations with their parents.

Donald Jasper Harris was born in Brown’s Town, Jamaica, to Oscar (“Maas Oscar”) and Beryl Christie (“Miss Beryl”) Harris. But his grandmothers were his strongest influences: paternal, Christiana Brown (“Miss Chrishy”) and maternal, Iris Finnegan (“Miss Iris”). Miss Chrishy was a disciplinarian firm with ‘the strap,’ but also affectionate — and a businesswoman who inspired Donald to study economics. Miss Iris was also an entrepreneur and an ardent church goer. Donald passed on to his daughters the values they had instilled in him.

Christiana Brown was descended from Hamilton Brown, an Ulster Scot who had immigrated from Ireland and set up a large plantation. Brown’s Town was named after him. In common with other slave owners, he had sex with his slaves. So there was both Black and White blood in the Harris lineage. Race is a complex construct.

Kamala Harris (sitting in front) with relatives at her grandmother’s house in Jamaica (Photo: The Jamaica Gleaner)

Harris visited his childhood haunts with his daughters: walking the streets on market day, chatting up the “higglers” in the market and rewarded with plenty of ‘brawta’ (an extra offering, gratis) in naseberries, mangoes and guinep after each purchase. Trudging through the cow dung and rusted iron gates, uphill and downhill, along narrow unkempt paths, Dad showed the girls the terrain over which he had wandered daily for hours as a boy repeatedly admonished by Miss Chrishy. They played on the beaches, bathed in waterfalls, and visited Donald Harris’ high school.

After the Harrises divorced in 1971 Shyamala got custody of the girls. The girls saw less and less of their father; it was a Jamaican farewell to the island in the sun. But the Harris family in Jamaica remains proud of Kamala. Jamaicans from different walks of life were joyful when Biden picked her as running mate, as were her Jamaican cousins Newton Alexander Harris and Sherman Harris.

Sherman Harris, Kamala’s cousin, recollects her childhood visits to Jamaica — and responds to Donald Trump

Of Indians and Indian-Americans

Indians take pride in their countryfolk making it big in America: be it in cinema or music (Mira Nair, M. Night Shyamalan, Zubin Mehta), on literary terrain (Salman Rushdie, Sonny Mehta), as business leaders (Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Indra Nooyi) or Nobel laureates (Har Gobind Khorana, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekar). This pride extends to second-generation Indians, U.S. citizens by birth, people like Kal Penn, Atul Gawande, Nina Davaluri, Hasan Minhaj and Mindy Kaling.

Indians unrealistically expect even the second generation in the diaspora to bat for the mother country. When Harris became vice-president, Indians anticipated that Indo-American relations would sky rocket. When that did not happen, they felt let down, never mind that the president, not the vice president, sets policy. In a Harris administration, Indo-American relations are expected to continue as under Biden; her mother hailing from India is unlikely to play a significant role.

In September 2019 in Houston, Trump attended a rally of 50,000 Indian Americans for visiting Prime Minister Narendra Modi. At this ‘Howdy Modi’ rally, violating unwritten diplomatic convention, Modi endorsed Trump for the 2020 presidential elections declaring, “In the words of Candidate Trump, Abki baar Trump sarkaar.” (This time around, a Trump administration). Modi also echoed Trump’s election catchphrase, “Make American Great Again.”

In June 2023, Biden invited Modi on a State visit which, even as State visits go, was an over-the-top extravaganza. During the visit Harris hosted a luncheon for Modi, where Modi gifted her a framed copy of a page from the Indian government gazette with the notification of her grandfather, P.V. Gopalan’s posting to Zambia.

Copy of the Government of India notification mentioning P.V. Gopalan’s assignment to Zambia

All of this notwithstanding, Modi’s base in the U.S. leans towards Trump, a kindred authoritarian. Historically, Indian Americans have tended to vote Democratic. And this time around many are fired up by the Harris candidacy. Indeed, across the country Indian American women who previously weren’t politically involved beyond voting are organizing for Harris.

But Indian Americans are not a monolith. Many back Trump and will vote for him again. And in a tight race, the Indian American vote can make a difference, especially in swing states. Through his remarks at the NABJ convention, Trump was shoring up his support among Indian Americans who favor him by sowing further discord: Guys, do you really think Kamala’s Indian?

Black and Indian communities have divisions between them as much as they have solidarity, and there are ways to drive wedges, such as evoking the false ‘model minority’ stereotype (that Asian Americans are smarter, more hardworking, and therefore more successful than other ethnic groups). Questioning Kamala’s ethnicity has the potential to cause discord between the communities.

Posters are readied for a parade in Kamala Harris’ ancestral village in Tamil Nadu

Roots of the Lotus

Some 200 miles south of Madras lie the twin villages of Painganadu and Thulasenthirapuram, so closely connected they are thought of as one. P.V. Gopalan was born in Painganadu in 1911, his wife Rajam in Thulasenthirapuram. In the 1930s, P.V Gopalan left the village when he joined the civil service. The family never forgot their roots; they make regular donations to the village temple, the Dharma Sastha Ayyanar temple. Indeed, Kamala Harris’ name appears on the plaque of donors; her aunt Sarala Gopalan made a donation on Harris’ behalf.

Harris is a celebrity here. When she ran for Vice President, the villagers prayed regularly for her success at the temple, sponsoring poojas, archanas and abhishekams (ceremonial worship). Billboards with her image were erected in the twin villages.

Kamala Harris’ ancestral village gears up as she campaigns for the vice presidency….

When she won, firecrackers were set off, kolams (decorations with chalk powder) were drawn, music was played, prayers of thanks offered at the temple, sweets distributed. Children were treated to idli and sambar, Harris’ favorite South Indian breakfast.

…. and celebrates her victory

There’s renewed excitement now that Harris is running for president. Villagers claim her as a native daughter; her roots lie here though the stem is very long, 8665 miles to the lotus blossom in Washington DC. Everybody wants to see her in person and no favors beyond that. And if she absolutely cannot visit, could she at least mention the village in a speech?

And now they are eager for the native daughter to reach the pinnacle of politics, the Oval Office

In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama describes his first visit to Kenya in 1988 on a personal odyssey to discover his African heritage and learn about the father he had never known. Barry, as he was known then, was 27, a private citizen. The airline lost his luggage. His half-sister Auma and aunt Zeituni picked him up in a beaten old car. He wandered on foot through the Nairobi streets, visiting slums, going out dancing and drinking, getting to know his father’s homeland firsthand. He traveled around the country by public transport. He met platoons of relatives.

And he visited his paternal grandmother Sarah Obama in his ancestral village, Kogelo. To reach Kogelo he took the night train from Nairobi to Kisumu, walked half a mile to the bus depot and rode in a bus so overcrowded that people sat in each others’ laps.

Obama next visited Kogelo in 1992 with fiancé Michelle Robinson, joking that they needed his grandmother’s blessings to marry. He was a senator in 2006 when he made his third trip but still freely traveled between cities and walked through crowds. Everything changed when he reached the Oval Office. He was cocooned in security on his Kenya trip; he did not visit Kogelo. He could only visit it again post presidency.

According to Sarala Gopalan, both Kamala and Maya were taken by their mother to the ancestral village as very young children but whether they remember that visit (or any villager remembers them) is unclear. Harris could still visit, of course, but the Secret Service will have nightmares.

Climbing a coconut tree, machete at the waist, to harvest the nuts; if you don’t master the art, you fall.

Memes make the world go round

Kamala Harris has generated meme after meme. One was a remark plucked out of context — ‘You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’. Harris was quoting her mother whose native Tamil Nadu is dotted with coconut groves. Men shimmy up a coconut tree and grip the trunk with their knees and legs while lopping off the nuts with a machete. Beginners not yet adept have an occasional tumble. Falling from a coconut tree, though an uncommon sight, is not unfamiliar, and it’s the sort of thing an Indian parent would say whereas a parent in the West might ask “You think you fell from the sky?”

Harris was speaking about equity in education policy, noting that not all students are offered the same opportunities to succeed. Everything is in context, Harris said, and quoted her mother: “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” and then adding “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

Another phrase that Harris often uses — “What can be, unburdened by what has been” — also became a meme, thanks to a supercut made by her opponents. This, too, was inspired by her mother as Harris posted in a tweet in 2020: “She understood the power of individuals to be focused on knowing there can be solutions. And doing that without any burden, without feeling any weight of thinking that we must blindly adhere to tradition and accept things the way they are. It is the work of knowing that we each as individuals can make a difference and then working toward that, knowing what can be unburdened by what has been.”

In this connection: Kamala Harris’ middle name at birth was Iyer, her Hindu caste name. Three months later, it was legally changed to Devi. The reason for the change is not known, but could it be that her mother, sensing all that her daughter would face down the road, did not want to saddle her with a caste designation? One burden less from what had been?

Kamala Harris’ birth certificate (above), and the legal change of her middle name to Devi (below)

Harris’ laughter has become a meme. Trump called her Laffin’ Kamala and worse, and her opponents highlighted it so negatively that she considered suppressing it in case it became a political liability. Aides persuaded her not to, and running mate Tim Walz declared that she had injected joy back into American politics. Harris says she has her mother’s laugh. Her mother would sit around the kitchen table with friends, tell stories and laugh from the belly up. Harris’ take: Be yourself. Don’t be confined by other people’s perceptions of what you should look like.

What better way to counter a panga than turn it into a complement? Harris’ online supporters have done that, using emojis of coconut trees and coconuts, affirming that they are coconut-pilled and doing the coconut tree dance. It brings to mind Harry Belafonte’s song Coconut Woman. The Internet has videos, like the one below, of Harris dancing and laughing: Ha ha ha! Coconut in hand, Kamala’s laugh is so grand! Ha ha ha! Across the land, laughing with her is so grand.”

Come, Make America Laugh Again (Come, MALA)

Then, there’s the meme: Lotus for Potus.

During Harris’ first sit-down interview after becoming the Democratic presidential nominee, interviewer Dana Bash asked her about Trump’s NABJ comment suggesting that the vice president ‘happened’ to turn Black for political purposes. Harris did not take the bait, and asked for the next question. The news organization Politico then came up with this headline:

Politico changed the headline after receiving backlash, but the damage was done.

Other than Native Americans, everybody in the United States (if not an immigrant themself) is a descendant of immigrants. But several generations later, these descendants often lose sight of this. They consider themselves natives of the soil, “old blood.” To carry the nation forward, an infusion of new blood helps.

“New blood” refers to people brought into an organization to improve it through fresh ideas and new ways of operating. Immigrants, brought up in different environments from those in their adopted countries, have new approaches. No wonder that many major businesses have foreign-born CEOs, among them Microsoft, Google (Alphabet), Novartis, Stripe, Coca Cola, Pfizer, Nvidia, IBM, Oracle, Instacart, Tesla, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. And 44.8% of Fortune 500 companies (224 companies) were founded by immigrants or their children.

The same can be said of a nation (the company) and its president (CEO). Take Obama. His parents Ann Dunham, a White American, and Barack Obama Sr., a Black Kenyan, met as students at the University of Hawaii. After her divorce, Obama’s mother married Lolo Soetoro of Indonesia. From age six through ten, Obama lived with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia, where he attended Catholic and Muslim schools. From age ten, he lived with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii. Obama reminisced: “I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a Black child and as a White child. And so what I benefited from is a multiplicity of cultures that all fed me.”

Over 33 million Americans (1 in 10) now identify as multiracial. It is America’s new face. In his seminal speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama declared: “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story…And that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.” Every word of this is true for Kamala Harris; hers is a quintessential American story too.

A foreign-born person cannot occupy the Oval Office. So unless, like Obama, they lived overseas for many years, their exposure to multiple cultures is limited. The next best is having immigrant parents transmit to you valuable lessons from their cultures while you grow up as an All-American girl — and that is Kamala Devi Harris. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.

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Note: The city of Madras is now known as Chennai but most references to it in this narrative are in the past, so the old name has been used.

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About the author:

Vishwas R. Gaitonde is an Indian-American writer whose short story collection On Earth As It Is Heaven will be published by Orison Books in 2025. He is on X (Twitter) at @weareji, Mastodon at weareji@mastodon.online and Blue Sky at @weareji.bsky.social

Vishwas R. Gaitonde
Vishwas R. Gaitonde

Written by Vishwas R. Gaitonde

Observer, narrator, story teller across genres. Vishwas Gaitonde's short story collection 'On Earth As It Is In Heaven' is forthcoming from Orison Books in 2025

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Have forwarded your article to a few friends who are like minded. Knowing the Republicans who will be digging up the earth and trawling the seas to upset her lead, your timely write up is very useful.

As always an in-depth well researched article by Vishwas.