Manu Joseph: Kamala Harris inspires us but don’t ask us to explain

Three kinds of people will extol her because they would misunderstand her as a beacon of hope and pride. The most obvious would be Indians who would celebrate once again the notion that she is of ‘Indian origin’ because her mother was from Tamil Nadu. 

The celebration of foreigners of ‘Indian origin’ is among the silliest things Indians do. It is as though the Indian links of successful foreigners somehow demonstrates that Indians have respectable genes.

But there is a more erroneous idea that Harris inspires and it is more sophisticated than the absurd pride of Indians in foreigners who look a bit like them. There is a broad consensus in America that the Indian community succeeds in America because of something that Indians do in an Indian way, something abstractly but innately Indian. 

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Americans of ‘Indian origin’ like this view. They use their general success to subtly and bluntly admonish African-Americans and other communities and tell them that the secret of success in America is very simply valiant human virtues. This is nonsense. 

Indians appear to do well compared to other communities because the first wave of Indian migrants were the social and economic upper class back home. They were the Caucasians of their native lands. In fact, they could migrate to the US precisely because they were a part of the elite. 

It was an extension of their privileges. In fact, by virtue of being born in the right homes, they had a head-start not only against most Indians, but also most Americans. This is what they never tell African-Americans.

Some Indians in America may point out that they emerged from what they claim are “humble backgrounds." For instance, the CEO of Alphabet, which owns Google, Sundar Pichai has said, “My father spent the equivalent of a year’s salary on my plane ticket to the US so I could attend Stanford. It was my first time ever on a plane. Without all that, I wouldn’t be here today." 

This, in fact, shows that he probably belonged to the top 1% of Indians at the time. Around the time Pichai took his first flight, Indians were so poor that if a man’s yearly salary was as much as a plane ticket to the US, he was in a position to favour his children in ways a majority of Indians could not. And that head-start is not a trivial thing.

The mother of Kamala Harris, Shyamala, too, though not royalty, was a beneficiary of belonging to the upper class in a poor country—a fortune that helped her migrate, legally.

When Donald Trump was president, he opened a broadside against migrants in America. His concern was entirely the poor among migrants. His actions created a moral counterforce, and influential people of ‘Indian origin,’ including Kamala Harris, spoke against his policies. 

They gave the impression that migrants were a single collective block of an identical class. But in reality, they had more in common with privileged Americans than the poor migrants who smuggle themselves into America.

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The third group of people who may see a bit too much in Harris are women. But then, the success of Kamala Harris is not an indicator that the time has come for women to have a fair chance at success. 

She is a sign of something more pedestrian, which is that upper-class women have greater opportunities today to trounce upper-class men. The fact that women identify with her because she is a woman will make no difference in a world where the odds are stacked against most women.

A few hours before I began writing this column, during the filming of the Olympic torch relay, Salma Hayek did a good cartwheel. She did it exactly like the little girls in my park. She is 57. And that may have brought a flutter to the hearts of many 57-year-olds, even though they can barely run up a flight of steps and they know they are never going to do a cartwheel in their lives. 

Hayek demonstrates that there are things you can do at 57 if you live the right way. But that is not going to happen to most people. They felt a flutter because they identified with her age, that is all. There is something human about identifying with someone in a similar circumstance. It is human, but also absurd. 

The fact that Salma Hayek can do something at 57 portents absolutely nothing for millions of 57-year-olds in the world. Similarly, what some fortunate women like Kamala Harris can do portents nothing for most women in the world. Unlucky women have more in common with unlucky men.

A more meaningful inspiration for women across the world are female athletes from nations like India, where they face enormous odds in their formative years. They are jeered at by their families, communities and even coaches. India gives them almost nothing; India is in fact their adversity. Yet, they are so innately talented that they triumph.

I wish I could say that the lesson here is that if you are a very talented girl in an objective field, even India cannot stop you. But the real lesson, instead, is that for the poor to triumph, first the field should be beyond the interest or capabilities of the upper class, like sports. 

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And second, men should not be in the fray. That would make the conditions ripe for true social justice to occur. Otherwise, it is just the 98th percentile beating the 99th, and calling it storming the bastion.