I can’t get over how much I have in common with Usha Vance, wife of the Republican vice presidential candidate. We both grew up in Southern California with immigrant Indian parents who came to America in the ‘70s. She could have easily been the kid sister of my best friend, an Indian American woman who grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb of San Diego, minutes away from Usha Vance’s childhood home.
Usha is a name shared by two of my beloved aunts. One a professor, like Usha Vance’s parents, whose name I would marvel to see on the spines of books. Another who didn’t get to finish college, who served love through her special pressed triangle sandwiches brimming with a delicious shaak of curried vegetables.
I can easily conjure a picture of Usha Vance’s childhood, back when she was named Usha Bala Chilukuri. Growing up in a predominantly white suburb, with highly educated Indian immigrant parents, an expectation of academic excellence, her parents passing on their Telugu language, culture and Hindu values through a close-knit Indian community.
Though “Usha” seems like an easy name for American tongues, I’m sure kids at school found ways to poke fun anyway. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she, like me, was told many times growing up, by well-meaning adults, how good her English was.
I can close my eyes and imagine so many details of her upbringing, and all of that takes me even further from understanding why she would stand by her husband as he and his running mate propagate such vile racism. I don’t know what Usha Vance might say to her husband in private, but publicly, she has been silent on his bigotry, which in my opinion makes her complicit. I’m completely confounded by it.
When she walked on stage at the Republican National Convention, I instantly wanted to root for her, knowing she would be judged for how she looked, a brown-skinned woman in that arena. She broke the make-up-caked, filler-stretched, balloon-lipped, Botox-tightened blond mold that is the more typical fare of that particular convention stage. She wore flats, she sported a natural look, and the vibe was “substance over style” in a way that felt authentic.
Her presence at the convention predictably elicited some racist responses, and I expected a robust defense from her husband, who instead was tepid at best: “Obviously, she’s not a white person, and we’ve been accused, attacked by some white supremacists over that … but I just, I love Usha.” It harked back to the simpering, kiss-the-ring spinelessness of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz after Donald Trump called his wife ugly.
I can’t help but wonder about Usha Vance’s reaction each time her husband’s campaign churns out a fresh wave of racism. How did she react after Trump’s grotesque comment about Kamala Harris only recently deciding she was Black? Did she think of her own three biracial children? Did it give her pause at all about who she was standing with and what she was standing by? I alternate between thinking of her as a victim and as an accomplice.
Sen. JD Vance of Ohio joined Trump at a memorial event this month, and one of the former president’s invited guests was the loathsome 9/11 conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who recently stated that if Harris wins, “The White House will smell like curry.” This was so blatant that even Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called it “extremely racist.” How did the senator respond when asked about it on the Sunday morning talk circuit? He hedged and meandered with a “I make a mean 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 housing at that most liberal of enclaves, Berkeley, and the landlord asked me, as I toured 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 wasn’t a one-off.
I have an early memory from my childhood of being terrified, though I lived 3,000 miles away, of a racist gang in New Jersey who called themselves the Dotbusters — dot like the bindi that many of our mothers, aunts and grandmothers wear every day of their married lives. These racists had an open agenda of ridding 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, sent them to their deaths. This was during the same period Indian kids all over America would get 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 tale as old as time, time-tested and time-worn — the political manipulation of people using the narrative that there are too many of one type of immigrant in one particular place.
Trump has perfected this technique; he who uses the word “Palestinian” as a slur, he who popularized terms like “China virus” and “kung flu,” he who, as president, reportedly asked, “Why do we need more Haitians, take them out,” in the very meeting where he called Haiti and other countries “shithole countries.”
That is the ticket JD Vance joined. I can’t imagine that his wife wants to be part of that. If her life experiences have been anything like mine, she knows better.
Don’t get me wrong — I get that there’s a pipeline for second-generation immigrants: from elite private schools to becoming a multimillionaire to conservative politics. Proximity to wealth and power is enticing, strong enough to distort and misshape long-held values and beliefs. And we do have some sense of what her beliefs once were. Usha Vance is a daughter of Democrats, who herself voted in the Democratic primary in 2014. Her politics might have started shifting before her law clerkships with the likes of conservatives John G. Roberts Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh. When she married her husband, maybe her deepest values hadn’t changed that much; back then he might have been the version of himself who said: “Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible.”
But that is not the version of the man whom Usha Vance is remaining publicly loyal to today. Today, he is the one demonizing immigrants, including legal Haitian residents of his own state, whom he baselessly accuses of eating pets, spreading disease and sucking up resources — constituents whom he turns into targets for other bigots.
Today, it is also JD Vance, not just Trump, who “makes people I care about afraid.” Because of this I find him reprehensible.
Dipti S. Barot is a primary care doctor and educator in the San
Francisco Bay Area. @diptisbarot