GOOD MORNING and welcome to The Yappie’s special briefing on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in the 2020 election cycle. This week, our editor Shawna Chen catches you up on everything you need to know about vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
The Big Story
DEEP DIVE—IT’S KAMALA’S PARTY NOW: Sen. Kamala Harris (D) became the first Black and Asian American woman to accept a major party’s vice presidential nomination last Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention. Here’s what you need to know…
- The freshman California senator’s acceptance speech centered on her mother, who immigrated to the U.S. from India and raised Harris and her sister largely on her own. “She raised us to be proud, strong Black women,” Harris said. “And she raised us to know and be proud of our Indian heritage.”
- Notable: Her use of Tamil caught notice immediately—Indian Americans called it a “powerful move.”
? WHAT THEY’RE SAYING—The initial announcement of Biden’s VP pick was hailed by a slew of AAPI organizations, including the AAPI Victory Fund, AAPI Progressive Action, and Indian American Impact Fund.
South Asians across the U.S. also celebrated the historic decision, with Indian American college students calling the nomination “empowering” and Indian families identifying with Harris’ heritage as the daughter of immigrants. However, some Asian Americans share doubts about what her nomination means for the AAPI community as a whole.
? Before South Asian Americans can embrace “Kamala Auntie,” they will need to confront anti-Blackness in their own community, writes Sakshi Venkatraman for NBC News: “[T]hough South Asians might be hungry for representation, celebrating only her Indian heritage is an erasure that feeds anti-Blackness and the model minority myth.”
Furthermore, Harris’ “mere presence” on a national ticket will not necessarily ensure AAPI civic engagement, Chi Wang argues in the Miami Herald. The media and major parties still fail to understand the diversity and complexity of the AAPI community; without dedicated, systematic outreach to all AAPI ethnic groups, AAPI turnout may not leave a mark, Wang writes.
On The Issues
At the DNC Asian American & Pacific Islander Caucus on Aug. 17, Harris highlighted the impact of the pandemic on AAPIs, racial violence, and Biden’s pledge to serve the AAPI community…
? CORONAVIRUS + AAPIS—According to Harris, 83% of the AAPI labor force with high school degrees or lower have filed unemployment insurance claims since the start of the pandemic, and that’s in California alone. “The pandemic’s impact has been particularly severe among the AAPI community,” she said.
ANTI-ASIAN HATE—Since July 15, more than 2,300 Asian Americans have experienced incidents of bias, Harris noted, but “‘bias incidents’ is a soft way of describing what we’re talking about.” She condemned the hate crimes and denounced Trump’s use of racist and xenophobic language to “sow hate and division among us.”
STRENGTH IN NUMBERS—The AAPI community “could be the margin of victory in key battleground states this November,” Harris said. “For years, the AAPI community’s voice has not been heard—its concerns ignored and stories forgotten. But this time it’s different.” She added that Biden has pledged to appoint more AAPI judges than all previous administrations combined.
Identity
Notably, the debate surrounding Sen. Harris’ race flared up almost immediately after her selection was announced, with both the media and voters uncertain on how to categorize her…
? RECAP—Sources tell The Yappie that a number of newsrooms held internal discussions and posted guidelines on how to describe her background—Black and of South Asian descent, Black and Asian American, Black and of Indian descent, of Jamaican and Indian descent, Black and only Black. These national conversations about Harris’ identity, however, are trivializing the complexities of race in an attempt to pigeonhole her, Marissa Martinez argues.
- Many mixed people internalize a number of unspoken rules over the years, Martinez writes for The Objective, including the trope that they have to “choose” between races: “Today, we could feel 100 percent Black and Asian on the inside, but on the outside, we live in a world where the ‘Big Decision’ to pick a side dominates the mixed narrative.”
- The takeaway: “If [journalists] don’t learn how to appropriately report on Harris, one of the most visible politicians for at least the next few months, without relying on misogynoir, there is little hope that millions of other Black, South Asian and multiracial people can expect proper coverage,” Martinez contends.
? A MULTIRACIAL IDENTITY—In a piece for Vox, Nisha Chittal also delved into the intertwined and complicated history of the Black and Asian identities. Though the multiracial “identity group is rapidly growing, many Americans still don’t know how to talk about multiracial people,” Chittal writes, and the current conversations surrounding Harris prove this.
On The Trail
? THE LATEST—Harris gave a short speech on Tuesday at the Biden campaign’s National AAPIs Assemble Launch and Phone Bank. Her two-minute-long address to AAPI voters underscored a plan to stabilize the country amid the pandemic, lift up small businesses and workers, expand access to health care, reform the immigration system, and root out systemic racism.
- She invoked her mother as the example of someone who “understood that the core of her new home in America was that we not only strive for success but to leave our country better than we found it.” That is the approach she instilled in her daughter, Harris said.
- The main message of the night appeared tailored to AAPI voters, appealing to them to turn out in November, especially as many observers predict that AAPI support will tip the election’s results. “We will win this race. We will build back better. And we will unite our country again,” Harris said. “But only together. Only with your help.”
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