About a week after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, I was sitting down to dinner with my Indian immigrant grandmother when she asked: “So…Kamala [Harris] really likes to talk about her Black identity more than her Indian side, it seems?” Implicit in this question was the idea that Harris was not Indian enough, that she was not a good, true representative of our community.

“Why do you say that?” I responded.

“Well, that is what my friends have been saying,” she answered.

This exchange has been on my mind since, and I believe it is reflective of deeply ingrained prejudice, racism, and archetypes within the South Asian community at large.

The idea that Harris is not Indian enough to claim her South Asian identity has circulated in discourse I’ve heard for many years but has certainly become especially visible as Harris became the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee this year. Many of these claims, that Harris is not Indian enough or shies away from her Indian heritage too much, stem from her mixed race heritage and highlight the exclusion of mixed race South Asians from community definitions of what it means to be Indian.

South Asians can be, in my experience, very resistant to the idea of mixed race South Asians. As a multiracial South Asian person myself, I know this to be true, from constantly being reminded that I am not a “real” Indian—whatever that means—to the stares I received from my South Asian dance students when I rode home from class one day with my white father. Many South Asians I know posted inflammatory infographics when Indian actress Priyanka Chopra married Nick Jonas, claiming that she was a disgrace to our culture for marrying a white man. I have even been told that my own mother is a disgrace for her marital choices and that I must be an illegitimate child because no self-respecting Indian woman would allow herself to be impregnated by a white man. 

So yes, I’ve experienced the hate our community shows towards mixed race people and know this prejudice well. Perhaps this stems from our rich history of exclusivity in marital arrangements bounded by caste, religious subsect, regional ethnic group, and astrological compatibility. We have been so reluctant to allow our kin to marry outside our insular cultural groups that incest has been common—my grandmother told me that many of my grandfather’s cousins married one another in part due to these forces. Maybe a genetic history of incest could explain some of my own eccentricism.

Anyway, South Asian culture has been extremely resistant to marriage outside our small cultural groups, therefore it positions those who transgress against these norms as uncultured or not properly South Asian. I argue that our community’s negative attitude toward Kamala Harris’ expression of her Indian identity is an extension of these cultural forces.

South Asians can also be incredibly anti-Black. One of the first things my extended family told my aunt when we last visited India was how dark she had become and how sad they were that she had darkened. Blackface is common in Bollywood movies made as recently as the 1980s, often deployed in scenes that depict humans acting like monkeys, dancing in cages with animal prints, feathers accessorizing their loincloths. 

Because of this rich tradition of colorism and anti-African racism, I would also argue that the South Asian community’s refusal to accept Harris as one of our own also in part stems from our anti-Blackness—not only is Harris biracial, but she is half-Black, an identity that we as a community see as below us. Perhaps many view her as a repository of inferior blood, therefore unfit to be a true South Asian due to her Black heritage. 

Additionally, we have an extremely limited conception of what it means to be Indian. The “Indian” experience, particularly in the diaspora, is centered around very specific cultural experiences including knowledge of particular Hindi songs, Bollywood movies, the Hindi language, Hinduism, and having a large group of South Asian friends. Growing up, the people I knew who did not check all these boxes were considered “whitewashed” and were seen as lesser than the “true” South Asians that could relate to all of these experiences.

In reality, however, there is not one true essence to being South Asian, even within the diaspora. The subcontinent itself is so diverse that homogeneity of cultural experience is impossible. Harris is Tamil, from an ethnic group from the southernmost part of India—why would she speak Hindi, watch Bollywood films, or listen to Hindi music if this language is nowhere within her family’s cultural heritage? Harris is also biracial and grew up in America—why do we expect her to live as if her only heritage is South Asian and as if she was raised in India? Beyond this, why do we expect her experiences with her South Asian culture to be entirely positive? Noting the South Asian community’s virulent racism, it would make sense that Harris might want to distance herself from certain elements of Indian culture or have a complicated relationship with elements of South Asian culture—after all, it is hard to embrace a value system that seems to devalue your own existence. 

Harris’ culture is not centered around being Indian, but around being an American-born, half-Tamil, half-Black, biracial woman. And that is a lot more complicated than the archetype of being South Asian that we expect of her. Harris is not the only South Asian person that is biracial, or that was born in America, or that is a woman, or that has a complicated relationship with their culture. But we as a community fail to recognize the complexities of what it means to be South Asian and how that can be both a positive and a negative identity for many. 

I write this not because I want to defend Kamala as a politician, but because Kamala’s public visibility has made glaringly obvious the prejudices we hold as a community against those who dare challenge our extremely limited archetypes of what it means to be Desi. And I would like to think that we can, as a community, learn to be more accepting of the plurality of South Asian experiences and identities. After all, we are an incredibly diverse population with boundless linguistic, racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity that results in a plurality of experiences that simply cannot be defined or confined.

I am reminded of a moment in Professor Laura Grappo’s Latin American Studies class, when we were asked to define what it meant to be Latino; after a few chuckles over one student’s answer of “we all eat rice and beans,” we quickly understood that there was no singular experience that could define or bring together every Latino person. The same can be said for South Asians, but we are resistant to the idea that we cannot be defined as a community. But we must embrace our lack of definition in order to openly accept the range of South Asian experiences within our population. Some hate our culture because it has only shown them pain, some love our culture because it has only shown them light, and many fall somewhere in between. We must accept and embrace this entire spectrum—only then can we truly find community with one another.
Akhil Joondeph is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at ajoondeph@wesleyan.edu.