The Rise Of Indian (South Asian) Americans In United States Politics In 2024 (YouTube video & article excerpts)

New York Post, May 10, 2024  #vivekramaswamy #politics #anncoulter

Conservative author and commentator Ann Coulter recently told former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that she would not back him for the GOP nomination because “you’re an Indian.”

Coulter, 62, made the shocking remark on a podcast Ramaswamy released Wednesday, on which the two spoke about nationalism and the basis of American identity.

“I agreed with many many things you said during — in fact, probably more than most other candidates — when you were running for president, but I still would not have voted for you, because you’re an Indian,” she said.

Coulter then doubled down by saying she would only vote for presidential candidates who are WASPs — White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

“There is a core national identity that is the identity of the WASP,” she said, “and that doesn’t mean we can’t take anyone else in, a Sri Lankan, or a Japanese, or an Indian, but the core around which the nation’s values are formed is the WASP.”

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Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post showcases a YouTube video and presents five article excerpts about the rise of Indian (South Asian) Americans in United States politics in 2024. Two of these articles refer to United States Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Addendum to this pancocojams post presents a 2024 article excerpt about Indian (South Asian) Americans surpassing Chinese Americans in the United States population.

The content of this post is presented for historical, political, and socio-cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to all those who are quoted in this post.

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SELECTED ARTICLE EXCERPTS 
These excerpts are given in no particular order and are numbered for referencing purposes only.

ARTICLE EXCERPT #1

From https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/8/14/21366307/kamala-harris-black-south-asian-indian-identity "The Kamala Harris identity debate shows how America still struggles to talk about multiracial people"

Identity is complicated, and she shouldn’t have to choose just one.

by Nisha Chittal, Jan 20, 2021 Nisha Chittal is the Chief of Staff at Vox.

"The swearing-in of Kamala Harris as vice president of the United States was a historic moment that celebrated other historic firsts: The first Latinx Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, did the honors as Harris’s hand rested on the Bible that belonged to Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice.

In her new role, Harris will break many barriers of her own: She is the first woman, first Black person, and first person of South Asian descent to become the vice president of the United States.

But such boundary-breaking is never without strife. When Harris was nominated in August, her biracial identity prompted much discussion on social and traditional media about her background as the daughter of an Indian immigrant mother and a Jamaican immigrant father. While some South Asian voters were upset that this part of her identity has long been downplayed, others were excited about the historic nature of her nomination and what it represents for South Asian American women and women of color. Meanwhile, some Black voters debated whether she is truly “Black enough,” and far-right critics pushed birther-style arguments, questioning whether Harris is a US citizen and her eligibility for vice president.

[…]

But her multiracial identity shouldn’t have been new information. Harris has had a long career in public life: She was a San Francisco district attorney, the California attorney general, a US senator, and ran for the Democratic nomination for president last year. And yet for years, she has primarily been identified as a Black woman in the public eye, with her South Asian identity rarely mentioned in media coverage until fairly recently. Some of this could be a personal choice — a longtime friend of Harris’s told the Washington Post in 2019 that he had only learned she was also of South Asian descent after knowing her for 15 years."

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ARTICLE EXCERPT #2 [Press Release]
From https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-biden-asian-americans-nevada-pennsylvania-2024-ab6de235e8d19216aa0f65559e6515da

Vice President Kamala Harris leads new campaign effort to reach out to Asian American voters

Updated 12:00 PM EDT, July 9, 2024
"WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is launching its formal outreach campaign to Asian American voters, putting Vice President Kamala Harris at the forefront of the effort with events in Nevada and Pennsylvania this week.

AANHPIs for Biden-Harris (AANHPI stands for Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander) will kick off with an event in Las Vegas on Tuesday with former “Top Chef” host Padma Lakshmi. Harris is the first person of South Asian descent to serve as vice president, and the spotlight on her has only grown since Biden’s stumbling debate performance last month raised questions about whether he would withdraw his candidacy and Harris would take his place.

Harris will also deliver a keynote address Saturday at a town hall in Philadelphia hosted by APIAVote, an advocacy group focused on mobilizing Asian American voters.”…

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ARTICLE EXCERPT #3
From https://www.thenation.com/article/society/the-divided-indian-american-political-landscape/ "The Divided Landscape of Indian American Politics"

The Desi diaspora is both rising up and fracturing on issues of religion, race, and caste, with far-reaching implications for US politics.

by Jeet Heer

This article appears in the February 2024 issue, with the headline “Desi Divides.”

“You can tell that an ethnic group is really flourishing in the United States when they start to produce prominent xenophobes and racists, particularly of the anti-Black variety. The trajectory from victim to victimizer is one of the surest markers of upward social mobility. In 1993, Toni Morrison ruefully noted in Time magazine that assimilation means immigrants must join “freely in this most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture: negative appraisals of the native-born Black population.” In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the ramparts of white supremacy were maintained by old-school Protestants who organized groups like the Know Nothings and the second Ku Klux Klan to terrorize not just people of color but also Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and Jewish Americans. In the 21st century, the most prominent bigots of the MAGA right are the descendants of these groups: figures like Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and Stephen Miller.

One of the few intriguing developments in the 2024 Republican primary is fresh evidence that Indian Americans—or at least a significant cohort of them—might join this longstanding trend. The two candidates who have made the biggest unexpected splash in the GOP primaries are the tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. While Donald Trump has long dominated the race, Ramaswamy’s campaign enjoyed a brief surge in August, and as this issue went to press, Haley was still riding a better—and longer—uptick. Both of these candidates of Indian descent are only nominally Trump rivals; given his near lock on the nomination, they’re more plausibly auditioning to be members of a future Trump administration, perhaps as vice president, by showing that they can sell the MAGA platform in a stylish new form. In so doing, they are fully participating in the “rite of passage into American culture” that Morrison wrote about 30 years ago.

[…]

For many Indian Americans—a community that overwhelmingly votes for Democrats—the rise of candidates like Ramaswamy and Haley is a good news/bad news joke. The good news is that Indian Americans, whose prominence in American public life is relatively new, are now fielding multiple political candidates on the national stage. The bad news is that two of the most visible of these openly embrace the most rancid forms of white supremacy, including neo-Nazi talking points and neo-Confederate historical mythology.

The rapid rise of Indian Americans is one of the most startling domestic events in 21st-century America, and one of the great success stories of liberal multiculturalism. Even Joe Biden, in his awkward way, has taken notice. In 2021, Biden was talking to Swati Mohan, the NASA scientist who was then overseeing the landing of the Mars rover Perseverance. Mohan was born in Karnataka, India, in 1983, a fact that inspired Biden to remark: “It’s amazing. Indian—of descent—Americans are taking over the country: you, my vice president [Kamala Harris], my speechwriter Vinay [Reddy]…. You guys are incredible.”

By some measures, Indian Americans are now the most economically successful ethnic group in America, an almost complete reversal from a century earlier, when they were a tiny, impoverished minority near the bottom of the social pecking order. Indian Americans have made their names in countless fields, from tech (Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai) to science (Nobel laureate in chemistry Venkatraman Ramakrishnan) to literature (Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri) to journalism (Ali Velshi) to music (Norah Jones, the daughter of Ravi Shankar) to comedy (Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari, Hasan Minhaj).

Given the success of Indian Americans in so many walks of life, it may seem unfair or masochistic to see any import in the prominence of racist hustlers like Ramaswamy and Haley (or their intellectual forebear, the far-right troll Dinesh D’Souza, notorious for his anti-Black venom). One could further point out that in 2020, the overwhelming majority of Indian Americans voted for Joe Biden, and the ranks of liberal Indian American politicians, headed by Vice President Harris, are large and growing, with five Indian Americans currently in Congress: Ami Bera, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Raja Krishnamoorthi, and Shri Thanedar—all Democrats. As head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Jayapal is the most influential Indian lawmaker in America, second only to Harris in prominence among elected officials.

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ARTICLE EXCERPT #4
From https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/17/who-is-usha-vance-jd-vance-wife "Who is Usha Vance, the Indian American lawyer married to JD Vance?" by David Smith in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Wed 17 Jul 2024
"Many Republicans have welcomed Usha Vance, the Indian American wife of vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, as a symbol of generational change and growing diversity in the party ranks.

Usha, 38, a corporate lawyer who used to be a registered Democrat, is the daughter of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu.

[…]

Usha has a very different story to tell from the last Republican second lady, Karen Pence, a white grandmother and devout Christian from Indiana who was an elementary school teacher and watercolour artist.

She is the daughter of Krish and Lakshmi Chilukuri, who hail from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and later settled in California. Krish is an engineer and university lecturer; Lakshmi a biologist and college provost. They are part of a tight-knit community of Indian American academics in suburban San Diego.

Usha recalled in a recent Fox News interview: “I did grow up in a religious household, my parents are Hindu, and I think that was one of the things that made them such good parents, that make them really very good people.”

[…]

Usha met JD Vance at Yale Law School, where together they organised a discussion group on “social decline in white America” – a theme he would return to in his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

[…]

Among the pair’s Yale Law classmates was the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination this year."...

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ARTICLE EXCERPT #5
From https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/trump-vp-pick-jd-vance-indian-origin-wife-subjected-to-hinduphobic-hate-train-us-org-condemns-online-abuse-101721327854244.html

Trump VP pick JD Vance, Indian-origin wife subjected to ‘Hinduphobic’ hate train; US org condemns online abuse

By Ashima Grover, Jul 19, 2024 

"JD Vance's wife, Usha Chilukuri, faces racist attacks from MAGA. US grassroots advocacy org. calls out “Hinduphobic” hate against her.

…soon after being crowned the Republican vice presidential nominee, the far right and other critics became fixated on his Indian-origin wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, and launched a negative racial rhetoric against her. Unfortunately, regular netizens weren’t the only ones who blasted their triggering abuse online. Certain individuals with massive influential platforms to present their views also joined the abusive hate train.

White nationalist “groyper” Nick Fuentes was one of these people. American far-right political commentator suffered a racist meltdown on his live broadcast: “What kind of man marries somebody that isn’t a Christian? What kind of man marries somebody named Usha? Clearly, he doesn’t value his racial identity, his heritage. Clearly, he doesn’t value his religion. He doesn’t marry a woman that professes Jesus Christ? What does that say about him.”

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ADDENDUM - INDIAN AMERICANS SURPASS CHINESE AMERICANS IN UNITED STATES POPULATION
From https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/indian-americans-passed-chinese-us-population-experts-say-trump-biden-rcna147069

May 8, 2024 by Sakshi Venkatraman

"After Indian Americans surpassed Chinese Americans as the largest Asian-alone population in the U.S., experts say they’re solidifying themselves as a political force — and a group politicians can’t ignore in 2024. From grassroots activism to voter registration to running for office, Indian Americans are a burgeoning presence in U.S. politics.

“This is a community that’s waking up to the power they have in the electoral space,” said Chintan Patel, executive director of the voter engagement organization Indian American Impact.

Indian Americans, after passing Chinese in U.S. population, are awakening to their political power

Indian Americans say they cannot be ignored this election cycle and are more sure than ever of what they want from their leaders. Experts say they could help turn the tide in 2024.

Those who identified as “Indian-alone” — or 100% Indian — on the 2020 U.S. Census number 4.4 million, overtaking the “Chinese-alone” population, which was previously the highest. When multiracial Americans are considered, Chinese is still the largest Asian group in the country, but the milestone pointed to how the Indian population has rocketed over the last decade.

In many states and counties where races are tight, winning a sizable portion of the Indian American vote could make the difference for many candidates, Patel said. In states like Arizona, where the number of Indian Americans is bigger than President Joe Biden’s margin of victory in 2020, their turnout could be decisive.”…

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