On a hot, cloudy July afternoon, my husband’s phone lit up with the news: 137 days before the American Presidential election, President Joe Biden was dropping out of the race. In his resignation letter, he endorsed his Vice President, a Black, South Asian and former senator, Kamala Harris, to be his successor. Following this announcement, she quickly made history as the first BIPOC (Black, indigenous, and people of colour) woman to become the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee.
When I heard the news, I waited for the jolt of happiness I knew I was supposed to feel — for the first time in history, American not only believed that a person like me could run for President, but also that she could win.
My similarities with Vice President Harris far exceed our nearly identical Tamilian roots. We’ve both been raised by immigrant mothers who were deeply invested in our political education early in our lives. We’ve both obsessively climbed professional ladders, collected accolades, and surpassed expectations that were always laid too low. We’ve both developed an expertise in navigating the very systems designed to keep us down, refusing to give into the expectations that we remain silent, submissive, and scared. To see someone so aligned with who I was and what I believed in should’ve made me ecstatic. Instead, my stomach dropped with dread. Because I knew what was coming, and none of it was good.
Predictably, America responded to Harris’s nominations with a cruelty that was, for me, all too familiar. From President Trump’s insistence that Vice President Harris is “not a smart person” to the Republican party’s unyielding racist, sexist lies about her life and record, the Vice President’s first month of campaigning has been a pageantry of bigotry. That being said, her fans have, at times, not been much better. While covering her, the supposedly liberal press perseveres in their astonishment that a biracial woman like Harris has achieved what she has. USA Today claims that Harris has been “underestimated at every turn”, New York Magazine declares that “Kamala Harris’s biographer says she’s always been underestimated” and Vanity Fair warns “Underestimate Kamala Harris at Your Peril.” In popular culture, Maya Rudolf’s portrayal of Harris as a “cool Aunty” combined with the recent rash of coconut tree and brat memes walk a thin line between celebrating the Vice President and questioning her seriousness, despite the fact that her evisceration of Brett Kavanaugh and sternness with Vice President Mike Pence are clear proof that Harris contains a toughness America has not seen in years. Even at the Democratic convention, delegates yelled out “Kamala” instead of “Vice President Harris,” as though she was a cousin or a neighbour or a drinking buddy rather than the most powerful woman in the United States. Could these people, I wonder, imagine cheering on President Obama by calling out “Barack”? Of course not.
And yet, despite these indignities, Harris shows up day after day, night after night, and event after event, tempering her toughness with congenial smiles, perfectly pressed suits, and faultlessly coiffed hair. No matter what the world throws at her, she responds with firmness, poise, grace, and calm.
I may not be a Vice President, and I may not be Black, but I am a woman of colour, and I know that calm. I know what it takes to grin at an American boss who mandates that you come up with a nickname because he, unlike one billion people in India, is unable to pronounce your real one. I know what it’s like to keep a neutral expression while a supervisor calls you “entitled” for asking for pay commensurate with your White, male colleagues. And I know what it’s like to remain composed when, in response to an opinion expressed in a calm and quiet tone, a stranger, friend, or family member says, “Calm down! Why are you always so angry?”
Like I said, I know that calm. I also know the cost of it.
For most of my life, I grew up being told that being born in the United States was a gift I didn’t deserve. In return for this opportunity, I was expected to keep my head down, work hard, overachieve, and never complain. I wasn’t allowed to make mistakes, nor ask for help. Despite the impossibility of this ask, for four decades, I did what was expected, rocketing through life on a stream of fellowships, awards, and honours, building myself a vibrant social life, and maintaining a thoroughly researched and highly demanding parenting practice. I did it all, never a hair out of place or a crack in my façade, never allowing myself even a hint of a frown.
During the pandemic, I broke. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep being everyone’s rock. I couldn’t keep doing it all, and I certainly couldn’t keep overachieving. Exhausted, I watched my career slip through my fingers, my friendships fade, my relationships suffer. When even parenting became too much to bear, I finally sought help – real help – for the first time in my life. I got on medication. I got into therapy. While some of my issues can be attributed to genetics, my therapist tells me, more of them can be attributed to simply living as a BIPOC woman in a country that expects so much more of me than my White, male peers.
A country that, now, expects this of Vice President Harris.
Which is why, come November, I will vote for her with a quiet wistfulness rather than ecstatic pride. I will vote for her wishing that I could witness her presidency without wondering what she’s had to sacrifice, or how her enforced infallibility has, like mine, threatened her survival. I will vote for her wishing that her term could be an opportunity for her to be tender and circumspect and vulnerable and flawed, all while embracing her Blackness and her Brownness with honesty and joy. Because if President Harris could do it, then maybe, just maybe, so could I.
In the end, my hope for Vice President Harris is greater than my fear. But that doesn’t mean that the next few months – and, fingers crossed, the next eight years – will be easy for her or for people like me, who will witness her battle a system whose brutality we know so well. I won’t give up on Harris, just like I won’t give up on my country, or a world where Brown and Black women have never shied away from the battle for our humanity. I just hope that Harris’s presidency is a battle that, at long last, wins the war.
Subramanian is a novelist, essayist, and founder of Moon Rabbit Writing Studio
