Well, it’s official. President Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 Presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee. This comes less than a week after the world watched Usha Vance introduce her husband, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as the Republican nominee for Vice President.
While we stand just months away from a truly unprecedented presidential election, it is worth examining the deep divisions amongst South Asian leaders and politicians and the ways they use or weaponize their privilege.
Usha Vance, formerly Chilukuri, is the daughter of Indian immigrants, an accomplished lawyer, and a Yale alumna. She is not politically involved and has mostly avoided the spotlight, despite supporting her husband’s career achievements. But with a husband like Vance, a man known for supporting a 15-week abortion ban, threatening IVF, and calling the UK an “Islamist country,” being apolitical is inherently political. While she should not be crucified simply for being married to J.D. Vance, her presence at the RNC shows that, once again, a privileged South Asian has weaponized their privilege to advance policies that harm the underprivileged.
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Privilege refers to certain advantages we benefit from simply by being born with certain identities. These identities can include race, gender identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or disabilities. Following the cultural revolution of the Black Lives Matter movement, we often point to white, male, heterosexual, cis, and able-bodied individuals as people who have benefited from privilege, while Black, female, queer, and disabled people as those who have historically faced oppression.
Systems of our society, such as access to education, housing, employment and other tools for economic prosperity are often built with privileged perspectives in mind and result in — in some cases intentionally — the exclusion of people who do not have the same privileges.
We have all seen the equality, equity and reality cartoon: those with privilege have built a system that provides them with plenty of boxes while leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.
Even in terms of Western society’s race-binary, being South Asian, and thus, sometimes racially ambiguous, can be a privilege itself. When someone is racially ambiguous, it makes it harder for others to target, harass, or discriminate against them. This veil of invisibility can be a form of protection against stereotyping and bias. This is especially true for South Asians with lighter skin. Colorism is alive and well in both Western and Eastern cultures, which can push some South Asians to perform whiteness, aligning themselves closer to traditionally Western values like capitalism, individualism and cultural hegemony, in an effort to distance themselves from the culture.
[Read Related: Kal Penn on Politics and Juggling Multiple Identities: ‘Diversity and Identity are Important, but so is Point of View’]
Conversations around privilege provide the South Asian community an opportunity to examine their own identities. Beyond race and gender, we should consider the role caste and religion have historically played in our privilege. The U.S. still severely lacks disaggregated census data on Asian Americans and provides little insight into caste and religious demographics; however, one survey found that the majority of Indian Americans identified as Hindu and upper caste.
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Recent events also show that caste discrimination still exists in the United States — in 2020, the California Civil Rights Department sued Cisco for allegedly denying an engineer a raise because of potential “low-caste” heritage. Shortly after, The Washington Post reported that Equality Labs, an organization dedicated to Dalit organizing, received 260 complaints of caste bias. While the CCRD dismissed the 2020 lawsuit against the two individual defendants, the agency continues to litigate against Cisco.
In 2023, Seattle and Fresno added caste to their anti-discrimination laws. Despite efforts from California state officials to bring this policy statewide, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill, claiming that current anti-discrimination laws were enough.
But, as those 260 complaints demonstrate, existing laws are not enough, especially because people with less power and privilege need more explicit and comprehensive protection under the law. Without such protections, claims from marginalized people can be normalized, disregarded, and trivialized. For this reason, legislation like the CROWN Act — an anti-hair discrimination bill – is needed to give additional protections to racialized groups.
[Read Related: Op-Ed: Reclaiming our Names: What Kamala Harris is Teaching us About Identity]
As we celebrate an increasing number of South Asian Americans in leadership roles across government and politics, we find almost all share the privilege of being Hindu, male, cis-gendered, heterosexual, or all of the above. While there is nothing inherently wrong about having these identities — after all, it is out of our control — it is wrong to use positions of power to further one’s own privilege and policies that largely disadvantage marginalized people.
It is worth examining how South Asians in positions of power have used or even weaponized their advantages. Vivek Ramaswamy became a caricature amongst the South Asian community and is an example of a privileged man who chose to align with White communities and advocate for xenophobic and discriminatory policies. Ramaswamy diverges from other Indian American politicians who have distanced themselves from their cultural identities like Nikki Haley or Bobby Jindal, both of whom converted to Christianity and changed their first names. Ramaswamy owned his Indian and Hindu identity and even drew similarities between Hinduism and Evangelical Christianity for the simple purpose of reaching a conservative christian voter base. Ramaswamy’s actions display how Hindu and Brahmin privilege — a status that afforded him the generational wealth needed for him to succeed in business — can be weaponized against marginalized communities. Even so, white supremacy prevailed when Ann Coulter told him, “I still would not have voted for you because you’re an Indian.”
.@AnnCoulter told me flat-out to my face that she couldn’t vote for me “because you’re an Indian,” even though she agreed with me more than most other candidates. I disagree with her but respect she had the guts to speak her mind. It was a riveting hour. The TRUTH podcast is back https://t.co/neVjKSs6e9
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) May 8, 2024
He is not the only privileged South Asian person to use his platform this way. Rishi Sunak became the first Indian British Prime Minister and advocated for policies that aligned with the British elite, including anti-immigration, and has made transphobic comments. Both Ramaswammy and Sunak publicly touted their identities and claimed they achieved their success through hard work in spite of discrimination, thus feeding into the model minority myth of Asians as the “good,” “determined,” and “obedient” race and that their pathway to success could be emulated by anyone who worked hard enough. In reality, Asians are much more diverse in class, education level, income, and migration status than the model minority myth leads us to believe. By perpetuating the stereotype, figures like Sunak and Ramaswammy encourage maintaining the status quo — with all of it’s faults, barriers, and discriminatory qualities.
[Read Related: Vice President Harris’s Cover Image: A Reality Check Vogue Needed]
Business leaders like Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Niraj Shah and other privileged Indians who have ascended to c-suite roles also have an opportunity to implement equitable hiring practices and opportunities for minority communities to achieve leadership positions. While these business leaders don’t necessarily weaponize their privilege, do they use their power to work towards an equitable society that ensures those who have benefited from past activism efforts (as we all have — hello the Civil Rights Movement which also helped end Asian immigration quotas) are paying it forward? Many don’t. Instead they often opt to uphold a capitalist system that maintains poverty for the poor and increases profits for the rich.
While VP Kamala Harris has certainly taken divisive stances on issues such as the Palestinian genocide, immigration, and incarceration as California’s AG, to the disappointment of many on the left, her presidential campaign provides an opportunity to combat colorism and anti-black racism. Her Black and bi-racial identity has not afforded her the same privileges as many other South Asian leaders.
Jimmy, I know your parents are proud of you. Thank you for joining me to celebrate Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. pic.twitter.com/rtejjrXbcF
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) May 23, 2024
The South Asian American community has a critical opportunity to determine where we align on the political spectrum. While there are many valid reasons for political distinctions within the diverse South Asian community, we are also dangerously close to aligning ourselves with oppression.
As a community, we already struggle with anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and colorism. We can continue to weaponize our privilege by becoming representatives of oppressive unjust systems that value proximity to whiteness and wealth. Or, we can resist the easy appeal of championing our own superiority and ally ourselves with other marginalized groups who have faced the same historic struggles as we have — colonization, exploitative labor and racism. There is so much more we can gain when we unite with those who are fighting for a better, more equitable world that we can all someday enjoy.
This piece is written by writer Devina Khanna in collaboration with Usha Sookai.
Devina Khanna is based in Washington, DC and works in Public Policy. She served at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and is a proud UC Santa Cruz banana slug and Carnegie Mellon alumna. She loves to sporadically travel, sample local cuisines, and nerd out on politics.
Usha Sookai is an undergraduate student at New York University, studying Journalism and Social and Cultural Analysis. With a passion for writing everything from songs to scripts and articles, she hopes to draw attention to issues that affect artists of all kinds and minority communities. Usha also expresses these themes in her original music. You can view more content on her Instagram @usha_sookai and Medium @usha.sookai.
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