CNN had a segment about how mispronouncing Kamala Harris's name was an insult to black women. Putting aside the idea that mispronouncing a word accidentally is...not an insult, did the people talking in the segment even realize that her first and middle name are from India?

As someone who has had my name mispronounced by virtually everyone I meet for 30 years, this is stolen valor.

I think this is how things like race/culture are fluid and constructed and deconstructed based off of what people want to get out of them. They didn't have any indian panelists on the segment, so there was no indian person to interpret the event that way.

I could see the exact same segment being played on Indian TV and people taking offense on behalf of Indian people, but the panelists were free to construct the moment as they saw fit, because none of these categories are actually fixed or static.

There's always an attempt to construct or reconstruct the group in a way that relates to yourself and make the person into your ingroup or alternatively push them into an outgroup if you're on the other side.

You could go even deeper and say that it was Tamil people that should be offended, or Brahmin, since those are the subcategories of Indian people that Harris's mother is part of. Or you could zoom out and recategorize in the other direction.

My general tendency is to just try and define the categories as broadly as possible so that the people who rule over us are not thinly defined as representing tiny sects of human beings but as many as possible. Kamala Harris, potential future VP, is first and foremost, American.

By the way I guarantee you the people mad that Tucker mispronounced Kamala's name once do not know how to properly pronounce Devi. For one, almost none of them are from South Asia so ya'll don't know how to pronounce that part of the syllabary.

And honestly, neither do I because even if I speak perfect Urdu or Hindi on the subcontinent everyone there knows I'm American because my accent sucks.

By the way Joe Biden got Kamala Harris's name wrong *today* after knowing her personally for several years and spending months talking to her during the tail end of this campaign during the vetting process. I'm guessing a lot of Americans are going to mispronounce her name.

It's slightly annoying, yeah, but I think if you're on a glide path to the presidency and access to nuclear weapons, it's a small price to pay! I doubt she's taking it personally.

Back in the day there were lengthy articles about how to pronounce *Barack Obama's* name, something no one gets wrong today for obvious reasons. It was an atypical name! That's okay!