By Sitting on my mother’s lap as a child, watching her sift through law school textbooks, and combing my hair at the same time, I remember peering at my reflection in her laptop every now and then. I didn’t have her nose or lips, even her ears. But I had her eyes. Big and brown, Indian. Something akin to a vision, some sort of parliamentary-leaning foresight, I knew in sharing these eyes that we wondered who we were together, what we looked like to other people.
I don’t think I let myself dream like the little boys, high-school-aged boys, or college men in my classes through the years. Rather than “let”, I don’t know that the thought ever even occurred to me. They were mostly born to white parents. Few were immigrants or first-generation Americans. Many didn’t like the places my family came from. Where “I’m going to be president someday!” spilled with colorful exuberance and animated panache out of the mouths of the boys I could never quite look like, sound like, or relate to, I marveled quietly at my mother. Indian immigrant. Multi-lingual. Once married to a Pakistani man. Schooling herself into someone who could help people that looked like us thrive in this country rather than crave for it and soon be stunted by the fear of being brown in America.
I never thought to be vice president or president. Even with a lawyer for a mother, something about it felt wrong. Boys are presidents. White boys are presidents. I thought, seeing my skin and Sikh-Muslim, Indian-Pakistani persona on tv labeled “terrorist”, being stop and frisked at fourteen years old, asked by the white boys if there was a bomb in my bag, that my womanhood and brownness was not made to boast itself in a position of power.
Older now, like many brown women, being powerful, political, and precedent-setting is a bountiful prowess borne of years of unlearning the racial and gender supremacy of the US, and actively searching for familiar faces to attach to. Older now, there is someone who looks like us, making history in her presence as she graces the white-stoked walls of The White House - Kamala Harris.
Photo Courtesy of Flickr
Daughter of a Jamaican Stanford professor and Indian diplomat and cancer researcher, Kamala Harris grew up in evidence that minorities and immigrants are the people who have built this country from the ground up. Harris began her career out of Hastings College as Oakland’s deputy district attorney, soon earned the title of district attorney, and then attorney general of California. She fought against gang violence and sexual abuse, unfair mortgage lender practice. She opposed Proposition 8; her voice is a great reason why my LGBT siblings and I can get married. Through her years of work, what women, and especially women of color, are so afraid of being - headstrong, decisive, self-assertive - became her reputation and is in line to become her legacy.
In 2016, t
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