‘The Trump-Vance campaign seeks to drive a wedge between the numerous intersections that form the mesh of Democratic politics this season’ | Photo Credit: AP

Caught in intersections, the Harris multicultural tent

The Trump-Vance campaign is trying to trigger conflicts in the Democrat tent to dent the Democrats’ appeal to multiple group identities

by · The Hindu

“They have a woman who is Black, although you would say she’s Indian, but she is Black... a lot of people didn’t know....,” said Republican nominee in the U.S. presidential race, Donald Trump, in a recent podcast. He was bringing up his opponent and U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris’s race yet again. By raking up this issue periodically, Mr. Trump has been trying to sharpen the fault lines in the multicultural tent that the Democratic Party fashions itself as. Democrats hope Ms. Harris’s multiple identity tags — Indian, African-American and woman — could help fuse these voting groups in her favour. But conflicts between these collectives are real, and Mr. Trump is playing on these, ahead of voting day on November 5.

Race and admission policies

The debate on affirmative action in the United States is instructive in understanding the tensions between Indians/Asians and African-Americans. In August, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released demographic data of the incoming class of 2028, the first cohort of students after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on June 29, 2023 (Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard) that taking race into consideration in university admission was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Between the classes of 2027 and 2028 — after race considerations were removed from admissions — the racial composition of students changed dramatically at MIT. In the fresh batch, about 16% of students are African-American, Hispanic, Native American and Pacific Islander compared to the recent average of their share at 25%. For African-Americans alone, the share dropped from 15% to 5%, between the two batches. The share of white students dipped by one percentage point, from 38 to 37. The Asian-American students were the gainers from all this. The share of this group, which includes Indians, jumped from 40% of the 2027 class to 47% in the batch of 2028.

One of the key arguments that Students for Fair Admissions, the petitioners, brought before the Supreme Court was that race factored admission policies discriminated against Asian students, which in turn undermined both merit and diversity. In the absence of race considerations, more of them would have been admitted, they argued. The defendants were Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, two premier institutions. The Fourteenth Amendment that came into force after the Civil War guaranteed that “all persons, whether coloured or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States”. It was meant at that point to protect the African-American population. U.S. affirmative action and progressive politics were tailored largely around the African-American-white binary, and the Native Americans, but demographic changes that turned the country into a multiracial country have complicated the race debate. Concurring with the majority judgment of the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas, an African American, wrote: “…. university admissions policies ask individuals to identify themselves as belonging to one of only a few reductionist racial groups. With boxes for only ‘black,’ ‘white,’ ‘Hispanic,’ ‘Asian,’ or the ambiguous ‘other,’ how is a Middle Eastern person to choose? Someone from the Philippines? Whichever choice he makes (in the event he chooses to report a race at all), the form silos him into an artificial category. Worse, it sends a clear signal that the category matters.”

Related Stories

When more universities release demographic data for the latest batch, the impact of the court ruling will become more clear, but MIT’s data is likely to be indicative. Meanwhile, the Asian-American campaign against race conscious admission policies is expanding. The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST or TJ, Jefferson) in Fairfax County is considered a pipeline to top universities of the country. Admission here is considered a sure pathway to a prestigious university and hence, extremely competitive.

An Indian parallel

Until 2020, admissions were based on a standardised test that Indians and other Asian students excelled in. Democrats changed the admission process to account for income and historical underrepresentation, which the Asian origin population in the County think harms their interests. In the wake of the affirmative action ruling, a group of Asian parents approached the Supreme Court against TJ’s 2020 admission policy. The court refused to entertain the petition then, but the question remains open.

The intersectional conflict among minority groups in the U.S. on the question of affirmative action echoes a conflict between caste and religious identities in India in the context of reservations. The clamour for affirmative action for Muslims that followed the Sachar Committee report (submission in 2006) turned out to be one of the reasons that prompted subaltern Hindus into the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s camp by 2014. The idea that there is a political conspiracy to favour the Muslims at the cost of subaltern Hindus in the apportioning of quotas continues to animate BJP politics.

Related Stories

The immigration issue

Though African-Americans and Asians could be on different sides of the affirmative action debate, they could be together on the question of illegal immigration. Indians form a considerable portion of the illegal entrants into the U.S. States every year, but the overwhelming majority of the Indian-American community has come to the country through legal routes. All foreign students who graduate from a U.S. university should be automatically eligible for permanent residency in the U.S., Mr. Trump had said in June. In his 2016 campaign also, he had supported measures to retain foreign talent within the U.S. Mr. Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, try to make this distinction between legal and illegal immigration, which many Indian-Americans/Asian-Americans might find to be a friendly policy. The Democrats, on the other hand, support immigration more generally, and their emphasis is on the welfare of the undocumented population. Mr. Trump has specifically sought to link crime, inflation and the housing crisis to illegal immigration, and tell minorities that they are hit harder by this.

Related Stories

Transgenderism and classical women’s right politics also sit uneasy together. Republican proxies and the candidates present the promotion of transgender rights by the Democrats as detrimental to women. In fact, none of the categories is a watertight silo with many overlapping — as the case is with Ms. Harris herself, who is a woman, African-American, Indian-American and a supporter of transgender rights. The Trump-Vance campaign seeks to drive a wedge between the numerous intersections that form the mesh of Democratic politics this season. The Indian or Black question is a start.

varghese.g@thehindu.co.in

Published - October 28, 2024 12:16 am IST