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The Washington Post erases Kamala Harris's Tamil heritage and the cultural heritage of the woman who raised her and who gave her a Sanskrit name and Indian sociocultural education.
See everyone can play this game. https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1314280691153154049
See everyone can play this game. https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1314280691153154049
These categories are fundamentally very fluid, people just invoke them at will to make whatever argument they want to make.
During her run for DA in SF, Harris talked a lot about being Indian American, attended an event with Bobby Jindal, referenced going to temple as a kid. Harris has invoked both halfs of her upbringing. There were some really interesting articles about her mother out there too.
For the argument KA at WaPo wants to make though she has to invoke exclusively this identification, because she herself identifies with it
Meaning...it's all just political. What does it actually have to do with anything? Nothing. It's just a rhetorical device used to bludgeon people in debates.
An example of exactly how fluid these categories actually are, despite claims to the contrary, in 2014, only 27% of Americans referred to Obama as "black," as opposed to mixed race. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/04/14/is-barack-obama-black/
The categories change based on how people decide to look at them, and people are changing the way they approach them all the time. Increasingly the categorization is just nakedly political.
So let's put aside the "someone is X and X carries with it qualities they cannot shake." These things are constantly changing, there is nothing fixed about them.
Another example is that Kamala Harris's mother listed herself as "Caucasian" on her birth certificate. The reason why is because Indian-Americans typically self-identified as so during that time period. Over time, they shifted to identifying as Asian.
Was there something fundamentally different about them in one time period versus another based on this categorization? It's just an arbitrary thing, has no essential characteristics.
