I can’t stop thinking about how much I have in common with Usha Vance, the wife of the Republican vice presidential candidate. We both grew up in Southern California to Indian immigrant parents who came to the United States in the 1970s. I could easily have been the younger sister of my best friend, an Indian-American woman who grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb of San Diego, minutes from Usha Vance’s childhood home.
Usha is a name shared by two of my beloved aunts. One is a teacher, like Usha Vance's parents, whose name I marvelled at on the spines of her books. The other was a college dropout who served love through her special triangular sandwiches piled high with delicious curried vegetable shaak.
I can easily imagine Usha Vance’s childhood, when she was called Usha Bala Chilukuri. She grew up in a predominantly white suburb, with highly educated Indian immigrant parents, expectations of academic excellence, and parents who passed on their Telugu language, culture and Hindu values to her through a close-knit Indian community.
Although “Usha” seems like an easy name for American tongues, I’m sure the kids at school found ways to tease her anyway. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she, like me, was told many times growing up by well-meaning adults how well she spoke English.
I can close my eyes and imagine so many details of her upbringing, and it all makes me even further from understanding why she would stand by her husband while he and his running mate spread such vile racism. I don’t know what Usha Vance might say to her husband privately, but publicly she has been silent about his bigotry, which, in my opinion, makes her complicit. I am completely confused by it.
When she walked on stage at the Republican National Convention, I immediately wanted to root for her, knowing that she would be judged on her appearance, a brown-skinned woman in that setting. She broke the blonde mold with caked-on makeup, fillers, plump lips, and Botox that is more typical in that particular convention setting. She wore flats, sported a natural look, and the atmosphere was “substance over style” in a way that seemed authentic.
As expected, his presence at the convention sparked some… racist responsesand expected a strong defense from her husband, who instead was… lukewarm at best“Obviously, she’s not a white person, and some white supremacists have accused and attacked us for that… but I just love Usha.” It reminded me of Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s cocky, arrogant attitude after Donald Trump called his wife ugly.
I can't help but wonder what Usha Vance's reaction will be whenever her husband's campaign sparks a new wave of racism. How did she react after Trump's campaign? Grotesque comment about Kamala Harris recently deciding she was blackDid she think about her three biracial children? Did she stop to think about who she supported and what she supported? I alternate between thinking of her as a victim and as an accomplice.
Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance joined Trump at a memorial event this month, and one of the former president's guests was the disgusting 9/11 conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who It was recently declared that if Harris wins, “the White House will smell like curry.” This was so evident that even Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene I called him “extremely racist.” How did the senator respond? When asked about it On the Sunday morning talk show circuit? He digressed and rambled on about “I make a really good chicken curry” until, when pressed, he finally said: “I don’t like those comments.”
As an Indian-American woman, I can only imagine that Usha Vance doesn't like those comments either.
I once applied for accommodation in the most liberal of all enclaves, Berkeley, and the landlord asked me, while I was touring the apartment, “Do you cook with curry? Because I don't want the place to smell like curry.” I didn't get the apartment.
It was not an isolated incident.
I have an early memory from my childhood of being terrorized, even though I lived 3,000 miles away, by a racist gang from New Jersey who called themselves “The Spotbusters — like the bindi that many of our mothers, aunts and grandmothers wear every day of their married lives. These racists had an open agenda to rid Jersey City of its Indian population, and they began a campaign of terror in our communities with random attacks and brutal beatings that sent our people to the ICU, sending them to their deaths. This was during the same period when Indian children across America were being taunted on the playground after the movie “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” with the question: Do you eat monkey brains?
It's a racist story as old as time, tried and tested by time: the political manipulation of people using the narrative that there are too many immigrants of one type in a particular place.
Trump has perfected this technique; he who uses the word “Palestinian” as an insult, he who popularized terms like “China virus” and “kung flu,” he who, as president, supposedly asked, “Why do we need more Haitians? Let’s eliminate them,” in the Very meeting where he called Haiti and other countries “shithole countries.”
That's the ticket JD Vance joined. I can't imagine his wife would want any part of that. If her life experiences have been anything like mine, she knows better.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that there is a path for second-generation immigrants: from elite private schools to becoming billionaires and then conservative politicians. Proximity to wealth and power is tempting, strong enough to distort and warp long-held values and beliefs. And we have some idea of what her beliefs were in the past. Usha Vance is the daughter of Democrats, and she voted in the Democratic primary in 2014. Her politics may have begun to change before she began working as a law clerk with conservatives like John G. Roberts Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh. When she married her husband, perhaps her deeper values hadn't changed that much; back then, he might have been the version of himself that said“Trump makes people I care about afraid: immigrants, Muslims, etc. That's why I find it reprehensible.”
But that is not the version of the man to whom Usha Vance remains publicly loyal today. Today, he is the one who demonizes immigrants, including legal Haitian residents of his own state, whom he baselessly accuses of eating pets, spreading disease and sucking up resources, citizens whom he makes targets of other bigots.
Today, it is not just Trump, but also JD Vance who is “making people I care about afraid.” That is why I find it reprehensible.
Dipti S. Barot is a primary care physician and educator at San
Francisco Bay Area. @diptisbarot
