I started writing about the ludicrous debate whether the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee and Senator Kamala Harris hides or hinders or just hives off her Tambram (Tamil Brahmin) heritage from her mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan’s side.
That was a big mistake because my already existing migraine exploded tenfold while writing on this absurd subject.
The idea of Tambram or Tamil Brahmin is being injected into US presidential politics via the agency of the Senator from California. There are already articles making appearances in the mainstream US newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal by Sadanand Dhume who writes that she “…airbrushes her mother's community from her story. The words Tamil and Brahmin don't appear at all.” I do not know that to be a fact but what I do know is that it is embarrassing that we feel the need to narrow down the political discourse to whether a daughter of two immigrants—one from India and one from Jamaica—ought to effusively and insistently talk about her partial heritage in such excruciatingly specific detail which will be most certainly lost on a vast majority of American voters.
Sure, sections of the Indian American community, especially those of Tamil heritage, might pay some passing attention to that aspect of her life but the notion that she has to refer to her Tamil and Brahmin origin is pathetic. Dhume’s piece was clearly mischievously headlined ‘What Kamala Harris Isn't Saying About Her Mother's Background' as if there might be some toxicity or something odd to it that she chooses not to mention it. There is a kicker to the headline which said “Tamil Brahmins like Shyamala Gopalan fled identity politics and socialism for the U.S.” How does Dhume know she fled anything? Perhaps she just came to America like millions of others do—for a better economic opportunity and without even remotely thinking about “identity politics and socialism”. Incidentally, Gopalan was 19 when she came here.
This obsessing over the ever-narrowing definitions of who one is in terms of ethnicity and heritage helps no one other than commentators and columnists under pressure to whip a weekly quota out and get paid. Whether Harris was raised predominantly black in her cultural choices or not by her mother is also a subject of discussion.
I find such discussions damaging in the already deeply damaged social discourse.
Harris’s parents Gopalan and Donald Harris, a retired Stanford economics professor from Jamaica, divorced when she was seven and was raised by her mother. How much more could she be her mother, a “Tambram”, Gopalan’s daughter than what she already is and has repeatedly said she is?
My migraine is now a throbbing beast inside my head.