Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden's nomination of Kamala Devi Harris for vice president has brought international attention to a political figure fusing Indian American and African American identities. Harris' unusual Brahmin and Black ethno-racial ancestries have provoked a range of reactions from both American and Indian media commentators, with her layered inherited and socially constructed identities coming under scrutiny for a host of reasons: to test her cultural authenticity, as a barometer of her progressive racial and gender politics, and to calibrate her capacity to mobilise electoral cultural capital from diverse constituents. Despite some American commentators criticising her prosecutorial record, a significant section of US-based media has expressed predominantly positive responses to her nomination. Meanwhile Indian media commentators have had mixed responses to the historic significance of her nomination. The transnational media commentary generated around Kamala Harris illustrates the complex ways in which American electoral politics creates conflicting investments in the meanings of a political candidate's race, gender, caste, and class identities.
In the US, debates over Harris' biracial and bicultural identity – Tamil Brahmin and Afro Caribbean – unfold at a historical moment when caste has entered the national public lexicon of racial politics on two critical fronts. First, the recent California lawsuit against CISCO Systems broke the long-standing silence on how Brahminical caste power operates within the so-called model minority of the Indian diaspora to exclude lower castes. Regulators in California sued CISCO Systems following a Dalit employee's recent caste discrimination complaint against two Brahmin managers in the company's San Jose office. Second, journalist Isabel Wilkerson's recent book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents imports the analogy of caste from India – albeit at times in a less than persuasive manner – to diagnose America's persistent racial inequality. Wilkerson argues that the deep-seated racism in America can be best explained if we think of race as the skin and caste as the bones of racial hierarchy.