Kamala on Kamala : by Kamala Gururaja

Editor's Note:  Sree Gururaja has shared the following article by her 17 year old grand-daughter, Kamala, who wrote the article for her school's newspaper in Brooklyn.

I think a lot about what it means to be a Kamala in modern America.

I was named after my great-grandmother, Kamalam Unni, a Sanskrit professor at Queen Mary’s College in Chennai, India, from the 1940s through the 1970s. In Sanskrit, one of the world’s oldest classical languages, kamala means lotus. In the South Asian religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, the lotus is prominent in various ceremonies, and the name Kamala is often associated with the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, who represents prosperity, fortune, and power.

In India, and especially South India, Kamala is a common name, yet an old-fashioned one. Vice President Kamala Harris, who on August 22 accepted the Democratic nomination for president, walked along the same Chennai beaches with her grandfather that my mother did with Professor Unni.

To me, the name Kamala carries the strength of trailblazing women. And thanks to Vice President Harris, the name Kamala has grown to represent more than its Indian roots. I love that Harris celebrates her multicultural upbringing, because she represents the strength of Asian America and Black America, and how powerful these cultures can be when brought together.

Former President Donald Trump’s habitual mispronunciation of Harris’s name (he says Kuh-MAH-luh instead of KUH-muh-luh, despite having been repeatedly corrected) represents the Republican nominee’s fundamental disrespect for Harris and people with heritage different from his own. But on July 31, Trump introduced a new line of attack on Harris’s identity. He told an audience at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention, “I didn’t know [Kamala Harris] 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?”

This rhetoric is destructive for several reasons; it is a blatant falsehood that attempts to discredit Harris’s multiracial identity. But this rhetoric struck me as harmful for an additional reason. Historically, American media and government propaganda have compared Asian Americans and Black Americans to each other, creating a division that upholds white privilege.

For instance, in 1966, the terms “model minority”and “problem minority” were coined, in an influential New York Times Magazine article titled “Success Story, Japanese-American Style” by sociologist William Petersen. The “model minority” vs. “problem minority” structure compared Asian American and Black Americans. Petersen asserted that the success of Asian Americans proved that other minorities, like Black Americans, should be able to overcome discrimination and racism to succeed. More recently, right-wing groups opposed to affirmative action divisively pitted Asian Americans against Black Americans, successfully overturning affirmative action at the Supreme Court last year.

The efforts to divide minority communities are deeply offensive and fundamentally misguided. In his book “The Loneliest Americans,” about the relatively recent (circa 1960s) development of the Asian American political identity, journalist Jay Caspian Kang argues that “to find a meaningful place in politics,” Asian Americans should not have to “lie about ‘white adjacency’ and trample the Black community to get ahead.” Yes, Harris has a traditionally Indian first name. But the beauty of her honest and casual celebration of her identity is that she brings both communities together.

Harris often talks about the influence of her Indian immigrant mother, Shyamala Gopalan, who was a biomedical scientist. Harris visited Chennai with her family and sometimes attended the local Hindu temple with her mother. Harris’s father, Professor Donald Harris of Stanford, and his Jamaican heritage, were not as present in her childhood. But Harris frequently talks about how crucial her neighbor, Mrs. Shelton, was in her upbringing as part of the Black community.

Harris and her sister went to an African-American church and cultural center with this “second mother,” who taught the girls “to give and to serve,” in Harris’s words. And Harris first lived in Washington, D.C., as a student at Howard University, the iconic HBCU and alma mater of important Black figures including Thurgood Marshall, Toni Morrison, Elijah Cummings, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Religious studies scholar Archana Venkatesan explains that the symbolic meaning of kamala arises from the fact that the lotus is not impurified by the murky waters around it. She writes that “when one attains wisdom, like the lotus, one remains above and untouched by the dirt of deluding ignorance.”

Like a lotus, the vice president refuses to be polluted by asinine comments about her racial identity. In her interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on August 29, she dismissed Trump’s comments about her “turn[ing] Black” by saying, “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.”

Harris is not interested in making her race or gender identity a focal point of her campaign. But, as she articulated in her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, the joint Black and Asian community in which she grew up was formative to her values. Her candidacy gives all of us an opportunity to adopt such unity and solidarity in our own lives.

It is time to embrace every dimension of Kamala Devi Harris, rise above the ignorance of the past, and elect a president who, informed by her rich cultures, will give her best to us.

Kamala Gururaja