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As an Indo African Caribbean Woman, I See Myself in Kamala Harris
She offers an opportunity for me to share my family’s island ancestry
Some are quick to say they don’t support Kamala Harris, the Democratic VP nominee, for any number of reasons ranging from her heritage to her politics. But I feel differently. I feel pride. Harris’ name on the United States vice-presidential ticket makes me feel seen in a way that doesn’t often happen for many people from the British Caribbean. Like Harris, Nicki Minaj, Tatyana Ali, and hundreds of thousands of others, my identity is mixed with Indian and African ancestry, a caste known to many islanders and some Continental Indians as Dougla.
It’s a word that once was a term of derision used to describe the children of African and Indian parentage. But in recent years the term was reclaimed and some of us use it proudly. For my own lineage, British people brought my mother’s grandparents from India to Jamaica in 1845 to fulfill a labor gap on sugar plantations after the abolition of chattel slavery. More than half a million Indians from British Colonial India were taken to 13 mainland and island nations in the Caribbean from 1838 to 1917 to serve as indentured workers.
Over the last 182 years, there was bound to be some mixing. Estimates suggest more than 2.5 million…
