Finally, I was thinking. Finally a woman, and a woman of color, takes this position.
I felt like a marathon runner breaking down in tears at the end of a race. And that marathon was a lifetime fighting to be seen and to move forward, as an immigrant and woman of color with few guides.
I cried again when I saw Harris address the nation last weekend as vice president-elect. The world finally saw a black woman, whose parents came from Jamaica and India, near the peak of American power. That vision, in an instant, seemed to evaporate some of the unnecessary obstacles that I had faced, making a different path for a child like me growing up today.
Now, days later, everyone is talking about President Trump again. His refusal to give in shouldn’t steal the moment from Vice President-elect Harris: His time is up and his time, and ours, is just beginning.
When I first came to this country at age 4 from India, walking through New York City, I was excited to see all kinds of people, with different skin colors, clothing styles, and ways of moving around the world. But little by little I became aware of a different world, through magazines and television, where almost everyone was white.
I watched a lot of television: “The Brady Bunch”, “The Partridge Family”, “One Day at a Time”, “Three’s Company”, “Happy Days”, “Fantasy Island”. When I was a kid in the 80s, these shows raised me and taught me about American life.
Children know when they are being classified. I could see that the idealized America on the television screen and in the pages of the magazines did not value black and brown people like me and many I knew.
I figured out how to navigate the moment a kid called me the N-word when I was 11; and browse the times I auditioned for acting roles in my 20s, only to be told they weren’t “getting ethnic”; and navigate the times in my 30s when I didn’t know how to negotiate full credit for my work.
Things could have been different if I had seen more women like me in positions of power, role models to show me a way.
Often now, strangers, girls and women of color, come up to me to tell me that seeing my face on television broadened their aspirations. I’m just a host on a cable food show. Imagine how wide the shockwaves can be when a woman of color is vice president.
Harris understands this. “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she assured us. “Because every girl who looks tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”
During the summer, I learned that Harris’s mother’s family comes from the same city in India as my family. His grandparents lived around the corner from mine in the Besant Nagar area of Chennai City. Our grandparents could have walked together in the same retirement group at Elliot’s Beach. We both spent our summers visiting there, and they may have sent us on errands to the same All-in-One corner store that sold half-rupee candy and lentils by the kilo. In the United States, we were raised by single mothers who worked in health care, mine as a nurse and yours as a biomedical scientist.
When he accepted the Democratic nomination for vice presidency, he thanked him “
chitthis, ”The word for aunts in Tamil, a language of South India, not in Hindi, an official language of the country. Never in my life did I imagine a Vice President of the United States who spoke Tamil.
Our surprising commonalities made Harris’s victory particularly poignant for me, but I think it offers many black and brown girls and women a sense of belonging.
President Trump’s attacks on women, people of color, and immigrants seem personal to us. While allowing a pandemic to rampant in our country and even threaten our democracy, it feels like a betrayal that so many Americans persist in supporting it.
His vitriol encourages those who hate us. In the comments on my Instagram and Twitter posts, people often tell me, “Go back to your country.”
I say: this is my country. I have contributed to this with my taxes, my writing and television shows, and my activism. I am working to improve this nation, what you do not do for a place you do not love.
I would also like to say: So many women in my family and our communities have been invisible, even as we have helped build this country with our own hands. We have cleaned your bathrooms, we have served you in restaurants, we have done your taxes, we have ministered to your children in the pediatrician’s office, we have programmed your computers, we have cared for your elderly, we have even led your companies. But you have eluded us and made us feel less important than you.
Harris is part of a new generation of elected women of color, taking office in this absurdly divided time when people of color are rising and under attack. And these women are not only in power; they have stood out, often precisely because of their life experiences. Senator Harris pinned Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brilliantly reprimanded a fellow congresswoman, Ted Yoho, when he used a sexist slur against her. Representative Pramila Jayapal questioned Attorney General William Barr about the decision to take an “aggressive approach” against the Black Lives Matter protesters, but not against the armed protesters that packed a state capitol.
Now Harris will have new authority and scope as vice president. The Trump era she is putting an end to empowered people to show their racism in the nude, in scorn, mockery and acts of violence. For many people of color and immigrants, the message was clear: you don’t belong here and they don’t want you.
It will be a long and difficult road to undo that damage. But for me and for other girls and women of color, Ms. Harris embodies an opposite message: You belong here, her life tells, and obviously you can achieve absolutely anything.
Padma Lakshmi is the host and executive producer of “Taste the Nation” and “Top Chef” and an artist-ambassador for the ACLU.
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