The Lesser-Known Side of Harris’s Identity: Asian American

Daniel Chiang can remember one Asian American who ran for president in 2020: Andrew Yang, a Taiwanese American entrepreneur. But he was surprised to learn last week that there was another person running for president then, and in 2024, who counted herself an Asian American: Kamala Harris.

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Ms. Harris, the vice president and likely Democratic nominee for president, is known widely as the first Black woman to be elected vice president.

But Ms. Harris, whose mother emigrated from India and whose father emigrated from Jamaica, is less known as an Indian American and Asian American. Asked to name a famous Asian American, only 2 percent of Americans said Kamala Harris, according to a recent survey by The Asian American Foundation.

Ms. Harris does not shy away from talking about her Indian heritage and Asian American identity. She speaks often about the strong influence her Indian mother and grandfather had on her life. When she has addressed gatherings of Asian American leaders as vice president, she has often spoken in terms of “we” and “us” and referred to herself as a “member of the community.”

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That Ms. Harris is not widely seen as an Asian American reveals the shifting boundaries of race in America, where the number of multiracial Americans continues to grow and where the big-tent Asian American racial identity is only adopted by some Americans of ethnic Asian descent.

When Ms. Harris became vice president in 2020, she was regarded as achieving multiple milestones. She was widely hailed as the first Black woman to assume the role. She was also the first Asian American, the first South Asian, first Indian American and first woman of color. (On her White House biography, she is identified as the “first South Asian American.”)

The term Asian American is simultaneously a geographic and racial label, and also a political and cultural identity. Since the label was coined by student activists in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968, the term has grown to refer to people with roots in more than 20 countries and those who speak numerous languages.

But it is unclear how much Asian Americans will rally around Ms. Harris from a sense of shared cultural identity. More than half of Asian adults living in the country say they most often use ethnic labels — like Chinese or Indian — to reflect their heritage, according to the Pew Research Center.

And in the United States, when the term “Asian American” is used, it is still primarily associated with East Asians, in part because Japanese and Chinese people were the first to come to the country in large numbers.

Surveys have shown that Asian Americans and Americans more generally are less likely to think of Indians and Pakistanis as Asian than they are to think of Chinese and Koreans as Asian. That has remained largely the case, even as Indian Americans have surpassed Chinese Americans to become the largest Asian group in the United States among people who identify with one country of origin, according to a census report last year.

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Some Asian Americans are energized. On Wednesday, over 1,500 people — including prominent community leaders like Representative Judy Chu of California, Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, and Vanita Gupta, a former associate attorney general — joined a call of Asian American women to support the vice president, whom they called one of their own.

Among Indian Americans, there is also palpable excitement. Many Indian Americans have embraced Ms. Harris, delighting in stories she has told about her childhood visits to see relatives in Chennai and her love of Southern Indian dishes like idlis and dosas.

In the days since she announced her bid for the presidency, Indian Americans have been rushing to volunteer and donate, said Neil Makhija, president of Impact, an Indian American advocacy group. Many have also circulated a social media chant: “In Sanskrit, Kamala means ‘lotus.’ In America, it means POTUS,” or president of the United States.

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John C. Yang, the president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, an advocacy group in Washington, recalled that in his meetings with Ms. Harris, she talked often about ensuring language access for Asian Americans on ballots. Ms. Harris has previously spoken about the discrimination her immigrant mother faced for speaking English with a heavy accent.

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