Black, Jewish, Indian, Hindu: How Harris’s religious connections and identities play into policy

Vice President Kamala Harris is making a historic bid to become the nation’s first female, black, and Indian President, drawing from a well of Hindu, Jewish, and protestant influences. As the vice president leads the Left into the presidential election, voters will determine if her diverse background can unite the country or drive a deeper wedge into party factions.

Some Democrats call Harris’s multicultural persona her greatest strength. “Her multiple identities is actually her superpower in this moment,” Glynda Carr, the CEO of Higher Heights for America, a group focused on supporting black women, told CNN.

When she married Doug Emhoff in 2014, Harris put one foot into the Jewish community. As America’s Jewish spouse of a vice president, Emhoff led Passover celebrations at the White House and espoused support for Israel.

However, there’s growing tension between Harris’s Jewish ties, a community long a Democratic stronghold, and a growing pro-Palestinian faction in her party. The clash of identities has even shown up in Harris’s home. She’s stepmom to a daughter who posted support for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), an organization that reportedly has links to Hamas, the terrorist group that launched an attack on Israel and murdered over 1,200 civilians.

Harris’s comments in the wake of Oct. 7 suggest she’s listening to the pro-Palestinian movement and tweaking her support for Israel.

The Harris of 2017 fondly remembered her first trip to Israel as she praised the Middle Eastern state for the “Israeli ingenuity that has made the desert bloom,” during remarks to the AIPAC Policy Conference.

After Hamas’s October 2023 invasion of Israel, Harris condemned the terrorists as “appalling” and made it clear that “such attacks are never justified.” 

As Hamas’ actions were characterized by some in the pro-Palestinian community as the result of Israel’s apartheid rule and unjust occupation of Palestinian territory, Democrats were forced to reckon with a growing faction of their party that saw Israeli “colonization,” not “ingenuity.” 

“Hamas is coming,” anti-Israel activists wrote on a Washington, D.C., monument as thousands gathered to support Palestine in the capitol this month. 

The Harris of 2023 and beyond has been careful not to slam the door on factions of the far left who see Israeli warfare in Gaza as genocidal. 

“I appreciate you raising the subject, and I appreciate your leadership,” the vice president told a pro-Palestinian protester last year who claimed the U.S. and Israel were committing genocide in the Middle East.

In March, Harris became the first White House official to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Her rhetoric around the Gaza conflict reliably invokes warnings to Israel to make a ceasefire deal and end Palestinian suffering in the Middle East.

When the vice president met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month, her interaction with him drew criticism from Republicans who said she disrespected the Jewish leader. 

“Let’s get the deal done so we can get a ceasefire to end the war,” Harris said after the meeting. “Let’s bring the hostages home, and let’s provide much-needed relief to the Palestinian people.”

Harris’s angling on the Gaza conflict suggests she could be positioning herself to draw pro-Palestinian voters disillusioned by Biden’s handling of Israel back into the Democratic camp. 

One Palestinian-American person told the Wall Street Journal shortly after Harris announced her presidential campaign, “She has centered Palestinian voices. She has talked about Palestinian suffering, and casualties and spoken about this situation on a more human level.” Almadhoun was not going to vote for Biden before he dropped his reelection bid. Now, he is enthusiastic about Harris’s candidacy. 

Still, Harris enjoys the backing of many Jews, including the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA).

Last week, the JDCA’s PAC announced a six-figure digital ad buy to back Harris. 

The divide over the Israel-Hamas conflict among Democrats has become especially evident as Harris selects her running mate.

Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) is rumored to head Harris’s vice presidential shortlist, yet as a practicing Jew, the battleground Democrat has faced criticism from the pro-Palestinian wing of his party who are urging Harris to ditch the veep option. 

Meanwhile, as Harris aims to become the first black president and makes an effort to bring black voters back into the Democratic fold, she could face a dilemma: how to appeal to black voters — who support Palestine by wider margins — without alienating Jews and centrist factions of her party. 

Sixty-eight percent of black voters supported an immediate and permanent ceasefire in April, according to a Carnegie survey. Another survey conducted the same month showed that only 39% of voters overall support an unconditional ceasefire. 

As Harris weighs how Gaza policies could impact the Democratic patchwork quilt, some strategists say her South Asian Hindu background could also win her support. 

Harris’s mother is a native of India and raised her two daughters according to Hindu tradition. During an event last year with India’s prime minister, Harris spoke warmly to the South Asian leader as she reflected on Indian heritage.

“When my sister Maya and I were growing up, our mother would take us from the Bay Area to India pretty much every other year. And the purpose of those trips were many, including that we would well understand where she came from,” Harris told Shri Narendra Modi.

As an adult, Harris married an observant Jew and became a practicing Baptist.

“I don’t think we’ve ever before had a candidate who has navigated various religious spaces and celebrated those various spaces in such an intimate way as the vice president,” Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, president of Interfaith Alliance told the Deseret News. 

While she hasn’t indicated her Hindu heritage would reshape foreign policy, Shoba Viswanathan, who heads civic engagement for Indiaspora, a nonprofit told the New York Times that Harris “normalizes us in a way; she is a visible representation of Indians in public service.” 

Meanwhile, Sanjoy Chakravorty, the author of a 2016 book on the rise of Indian Americans told the newspaper that Indian Americans were “guaranteed” to support the Democratic Party.

His words come as other political strategists warn a shift towards the GOP is taking place among the Indian American voting block. 

“In the far left circles, there’s a hierarchy in what you would call woke politics of religion,” Anang Mittal, former head of digital communications for House Speaker Mike Johnson, told Religious News Service earlier this month.  “Because a lot of people on the left are opposed to Modi and opposed to Modi’s sort of version of Hindu nationalism, they have decided that any expression of Hinduism is essentially related to Hindu nationalism. That’s going to be very hard to move away from because the diaspora and India are linked.”

Trump’s presidency oversaw a strengthening of relations with India. The MAGA champion praised the country’s leader as “a great guy” even holding a Texas event for Modi in 2019. The next year, the two held a joint rally in India, attended by more than 110,000 people. 

When President Joe Biden took office, the relationship shifted. The Democrat’s White House expressed disappointment over Modi’s nationalistic policies, criticizing India’s Citizenship Amendment Act as “xenophobic,” and voicing concern about the repeal of Article 370. 

“They don’t want immigrants,” Biden criticized India this year, referencing the CAA. 

Earlier this month, a survey of Asian American voters discovered that Democratic identification among Indian American voters dropped to 46% from 54% in 2020. Republican affiliation increased from 16% to 23%. 

The polling comes as a practicing Indian-American Hindu has gained close proximity to the top of the Republican ticket as well. Usha Vance is the wife of Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). 

As Harris races to defeat Vance’s boss to become the first Indian-American president of the United States, she has faced criticism over her bi-racial identity. 

Trump has openly speculated that Harris is wielding her multi-faceted racial identities to gain inroads with minority voters. While Harris’s mother hails from Chennai, India, her father is of mixed ethnicity. Donald J. Harris is a black Jamaican with paternal Irish roots. 

While speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists conference, Trump said Harris “was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black.”

“So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she black?” the Republican presidential candidate questioned. Later, he posted a photo to social media that appeared to capture a much younger Harris in Indian garb. 

Harris has characterized her racial background as “complicated” and indicated that growing up, her mother raised Harris and her sister as black because going by appearances, was the easiest thing to do. 

Over a decade ago, Harris gave her perspective on her racial duality.

“I was raised by a proud Indian mother as a proud African-American woman. That’s how I was raised,” Harris explained to journalist Farai Chideya in 2012. ”Because my mother was acutely aware of the environment in which she gave birth to and was raising her children.”

“I am proud of my Indian culture and heritage,” Harris added while noting “it’s a complicated subject.”

As Harris campaigns on her bi-racial and pluralistic religious identity, voters represent an increasingly diverse electorate. 

Nearly 4 in 10 Americans married since 2010 have a spouse who is in a different religious group. Additionally, 20% of marriages in the U.S. are interracial, up from 3% nearly six decades ago, according to the Pew Research Center.