OPINION: Kamala Harris and Usha Vance: Distinguished women of Indian descent

At 5.2 million, Indian Americans are the nation’s second largest ethnic minority. They also are the most educated with 33% achieving college degrees and another 40% adding postgraduate diplomas. With these credentials they have excelled in all the professions, and they have attained, incredibly enough, a median household income of $152,000.

Shymala Gopalan, Kamala Harris’ mother, was an early example of this dedication to education. She graduated from Delhi University in 1957 at the young age of 18. The next year, she started graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where she obtained a Ph.D. in nutrition and endocrinology in 1964. She went on to become a breast cancer expert and worked in labs at major universities across the country until her death in 2009.

Harris’ father, Donald J. Harris, was a Black man from Jamaica who rose to become a full professor of economics at Stanford University. The couple met in Oakland at an Afro-American Association meeting in 1962 and they were married the next year.

Shyamala Gopalan took her daughters to the local Hindu temple, where she sang traditional Hindu songs. The girls’ primary religious experiences, however, were in an African American church in Oakland where Kamala and her sister, Maya, sang in the children’s choir.

Most influential, however, was the Rainbow Sign, an African American cultural center in Berkeley, named after the rainbow that appeared to Noah. Shymala Gopalan and her girls were regulars at the Rainbow Sign, where they met Black celebrities such as Shirley Chisholm, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou.

Memo to Donald Trump: Kamala Harris is half-Black. Her mother knew that her daughters would be perceived as Black, and she was determined to raise them accordingly.

Following in her mother’s academic footsteps, Kamala Harris graduated from Howard University (74% Black) in 1986, and then she obtained her law degree at Hastings School of Law in 1989.

For the next 25 years, Harris was a successful prosecutor in the state of California. She was then elected as the state’s first woman, the first Black, and the first Indian American to hold the office of attorney general. Before being picked as Biden’s vice president, Harris served four years as California’s junior U.S. senator.

Usha Chilukuri Vance was raised in the Hindu faith by Indian immigrant parents in San Diego. Her father is an engineer and her mother is an administrator at University of California San Diego. In 2017, Lakshmi Chilukuri, together with 2,300 other California faculty, signed an open letter to then President Trump cautioning him not to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

Usha Vance’s parents remain registered Democrats as does a large majority of Americans of Indian descent. A poll just before the 2020 election showed that 77% intended to vote for Joe Biden while only 22% would select Donald Trump. That support fell dramatically this year, but it is already clear that Harris will win back most of that electorate in November.

Usha Vance’s early friends describe her as a “leftist” and one reported that “Usha found the incursion on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it to be deeply disturbing.” She added that “she was generally appalled by Trump, from the moment of his first election.”

Ms. Vance was a registered Democrat in 2014 and, presumably, did not switch to Republican until her husband’s primary election for Senate in 2022. I believe it is significant that she did not mention the name “Trump” in her introduction to her husband at the GOP convention.

Usha Vance has had a distinguished academic and legal career. After graduating from Yale and an academic sojourn at Cambridge University, she went on to obtain her law degree at Yale. She clerked for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts and then worked at several prestigious law firms.

When Usha Chilukuri met JD Vance at Yale, he was an atheist and he credits his wife with a return to Christianity. He was baptized Catholic in 2018, but his wife remains a devout Hindu. In addition to a Christian wedding the couple celebrated in 2014, they also participated in a Hindu ceremony.

I suspect that many Trump supporters are saying to themselves what white supremacist Nick Fuentes said out loud: “What kind of values does a man have to marry somebody that far outside your race, who isn’t even a Christian?” Readers may recall that Fuentes was a Thanksgiving dinner guest at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.

Gier is professor emeritus at the University of Idaho. Email him at ngier006@gmail.com.