Our project is supported by the USA’s National Science Foundation and Luminate.
Asian Americans, composed of roughly 15 million eligible voters, are poised to play a pivotal role in the upcoming 2024 U.S. elections. At the national level, the Asian American electorate is getting increased attention; Asian Americans are now the fastest-growing group of eligible voters in the country. At the local level, important state elections in California, Iowa, New York, and Texas feature Asian American political candidates.
As host of the Asian American Digital Politics project, the GloTech Lab at UMass Amherst is launching a blog series titled Asian American Digital Politics Monitor to discuss national issues, local electoral races, and campaign controversies relevant to Asian American communities. We will also report on specific misinformation narratives and wedge issues targeting diverse segments of Asian American voters. This project is a part of GloTech’s mission to seek resilience and healing, and aims to identify harmful narratives in order to understand how we can mend the Asian American community.
Our project is supported by the USA’s National Science Foundation and Luminate.
Contributor: Yelim Lee, GloTech Graduate Fellow
While 63% of Indian Americans currently lean Democrat, both parties have made the bid to increase that number in their favor through Indian American representatives and candidates. From making dosa on YouTube to sharing heartfelt immigration stories, the identity-based performances and appeals from three Indian American women involved in politics—Kamala Harris, Usha Vance, and Nikki Haley—are examined in this post. While sharing an ethnicity with a candidate or their spouse can offer an initial advantage, the shared heritage also opens the door to intense scrutiny and gatekeeping within the South Asian community. In investigating community reception to these identity-based appeals on South Asian subreddits, we ask how South Asian American online groups perceive the sincerity or insincerity of each candidate’s appeal to identity. What do they regard as an authentic performance? Some voters might see these shared identities as superficial unless backed by genuine engagement and understanding of the community’s unique challenges and cultural values. This dual-edged dynamic highlights the complexity of ethnic representation in politics, where authenticity and active communal involvement matter as much as policy.
Social media has been alight with excitement over Kamala Harris’ rise to the forefront of the Democratic ticket and the potential for her to become the first Asian American and Black woman of color president. Hashtags like Lotus4Potus (“In Sanskrit, Kamala means Lotus, in America, Kamala means POTUS”) float around TikTok and X, tying Harris’ heritage to their hopes for her campaign. This conscious tie works as a pushback against erasure of her Asian American identity. The excitement has also translated materially, off the ephemeral hashtag into monetary donations. The nonprofit organization South Asian Women for Harris raised more than $250,000 in just over two hours.
However, Harris’ biracial identity has been called into question by Trump. The former president states, “She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. 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.” He accuses her of leaning into her hitherto unseen Black heritage in order to secure the Black American vote. This sentiment is echoed within the subreddit r/ABCDesis (a community for diasporic South Asians). In a thread that asked members if they thought Kamala Harris has benefited the South Asian American community, the top comments, stating “Kamala Harris as VP has done literally nothing for Indian people” and “She downplays her Indian heritage, instead likes to focus on her African side,” show displeasure with what they perceive to be Harris’ lack of active affiliation with their community.
Others, however, have mentioned that the communal affiliation runs both ways. “She & her sister were half black kids who were children of divorce in the 1970s. I think its quite likely that at the time she grew up she probably faced a lot of racism from other Indian families.” Some members of the community, though, feel that Harris has maintained more cultural ties than other Indian American candidates. “I get the impression she does actually know some things about Indian culture, and she’s better representation than Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy (who, despite the current narratives being pushed, were actually not that popular amongst the Indian community),” says an Indian American woman in r/AsianAmerican. Harris has made posts on Instagram and X during AAPI Heritage Month; she participated in a night market where she remarked on the historical importance of such spaces to ethnic communities, writing in an Instagram post, “They bring us together over shared love of family, friends, and food.” She made dosas with Indian American actress Mindy Kaling and joined events hosted by Asian Americans organizations, including a conversational interview moderated by popular Asian American comedian Jimmy O. Yang. To Indian American communities, authenticity and sincerity, it seems, require visible participation in and knowledge of Indian culture. Proving one’s commitment and knowledge means more than just a shoutout at rallies.
Harris isn’t the only Indian American woman in politics who has had her identity as an Indian American questioned. There have been numerous articles that highlight how Usha Vance, the Indian American wife of JD Vance—Trump’s ticket-mate, and her identity as an Indian American may help the Republican campaign. However, Vance has garnered a frosty welcome from not only Trump’s fans but also young Indian Americans and the larger AAPI community online. Despite her being a practicing Hindu and the child of immigrants, it seems as though members of the community don’t claim her as their own.
In a larger AAPI subreddit, one member commented, “I’m sorry, but you won’t convince me to like a politician just because they’re either Asian or married to someone who is.” Another member agreed, “Yeah as an Indian American woman myself, I don’t like her just because she also has the same surface level identity.” Compared to the conflicted opinions on Kamala Harris, commenters on r/ABCDesis mostly do not claim Vance as a community member or accept her appeals to a shared identity. They reference Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ to question Vance’s connection to the South Asian community or perhaps call into doubt her commitment to the community’s struggles. In particular, members of the subreddit were upset that Vance’s identity as a successful Indian American woman who graduated from Yale was being used to push a model minority myth that doesn’t speak for all Desi identities. The members suspected that the spotlight on Usha Vance’s ethnicity and family history was insincere and in part to appeal to South Asian Americans’ vote without a full understanding of the heterogeneity of the South Asian diaspora.
Finally, we observed that Indian American online groups expressed shock at Nikki Haley’s references to her Punjabi identity. At the start of her 2024 presidential campaign, Haley (R) called herself the “Proud daughter of Indian immigrants. Not Black, not white.” Some South Asians responded with “TIL (Today I learned) she’s Punjabi.” Moreover, the online community noted that they couldn’t find “brownness” in any of her policies. Others noted how Harris has chosen to keep her ethnic first name (Kamala) in her professional endeavors while Haley chooses to go by an easier to pronounce middle name (Nikki). “She also identifies as white in her voter registration document,” one commenter adds. “I mean, I guess you can make the guess that this is how Indians self identified 40-50 years ago…maybe looking at it as a millennial it doesn’t sit well with me because I always mark myself as Asian.” This commenter sees that their active affiliation with the Asian American bloc is not reflected within Haley’s official documents and takes that as further evidence that Haley has distanced herself from the Indian American community. Without this active affiliation, any associated narrative is regarded as inauthentic and insincere. This perceived lack of authenticity is also echoed by community leaders such as Prakash Kopparapu, chairman of the Indo American PAC-IA, who lamented Haley’s disinterest in joining events at temples or cultural house parties.
This strategy of broadcasting one’s ethnicity on national television perhaps isn’t what Indian Americans expect when a candidate leans on their Indian American identity and immigrant history. Beyond community engagement, sincerity can be shown in political action. When, as mentioned above, the reddit member stated, “Kamala Harris as VP has done literally nothing for Indian people,” they are calling for policy or political action that directly responds to the issues faced by the Indian American diaspora. Pawan Dhingra, professor at Amherst college, asks why Harris has focused so heavily on Asian hate crimes when she could speak to policies that may help Asian American small business owners or immigrants that live in the U.S. without a visa—tangible, localized issues that affect the community. And not everyone is enthusiastic about Harris’ hard stance on crime or her response to the Israel-Gaza conflict (“I felt very proud, as an Indian, seeing an Indian at that level, so successful…But I was disappointed as a Muslim.”). The Indian American community has felt ignored by Haley and Vance as well.
The problem is cyclical. It is hard to develop a desired policy for a community without familiarity with that community. As stated above, even though 63% of Indian Americans leaning Democrat, their vote cannot be taken for granted. With the November election date looming ever closer, we look with interest to see if these women and other Indian American representatives can deliver on the sincerity and recognition their community desires.