Vice President Kamala Harris could become the most powerful person in the world, if she wins the presidential election in November. Despite the fact she has been in public life for years and explained how to pronounce her first name, many people still get it wrong.<\/p>\n
Since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her to be the Democratic nominee, there has been an uptick in racialized and gendered attacks on Harris and many of them have targeted her name, including by pronouncing it incorrectly. She\u2019s been called KAH-mala, KUH-mala, Kah-MAL-a, Kuh-MEL-a and Camel-a.<\/p>\n
But the correct way to say Kamala is, in fact, Comma-La.<\/p>\n
Kamala is a common and popular female name in India, from where Harris\u2019s mother, Shyamala Gopalan immigrated to the United States. It means \u201clotus\u201d in Sanskrit and the flower holds deep symbolism in Indian culture, representing purity and beauty.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lotus grows underwater, its flower rising above the surface while its roots are planted firmly in the river bottom,\u201d Harris wrote in her 2019 autobiography, \u201cThe Truths We Hold: An American Journey.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her middle name, Devi (DAY-vee), is the Sanskrit word for goddess. It is typically attached as a suffix to women\u2019s names in India as a mark of respect.<\/p>\n
Harris, the California-born daughter of a Jamaican father and a south Indian mother, has said that she grew up steeped in Black culture and causes, and also has embraced her Indian heritage.<\/p>\n
Through years of her public life, Harris has often had to step in to explain how to say her first name. When she first ran for Senate in 2016, her campaign released an ad featuring children elucidating the right and wrong pronunciations. In 2019, she explained it on television in an appearance on Whoopi Goldberg\u2019s \u201cThe View\u201d and corrected co-host Joy Behar who suggested the name was like Pamela, \u201clike we\u2019re used to.\u201d<\/p>\n
People pronounce my name many different ways. Let #KidsForKamala show you how it\u2019s done. pic.twitter.com\/7QoQGN0B4k<\/p>\n
\u2014 Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) May 24, 2016<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
But that hasn\u2019t stopped her opponents from repeatedly butchering her name \u2014 whether by mistake or intentionally. Nearly half of the speakers at the Republican National Convention in July pronounced it incorrectly. One speaker, Goya Foods CEO Robert Unanue, called her \u201cQue-mala,\u201d which sounds like \u201cso bad\u201d in Spanish. (GOP vice-presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), whose wife Usha is Indian American, pronounced Kamala correctly.)<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were explaining to me, \u2018You can say KA-ma-la. You can say Ka-MA-la,\u2019\u201d former president Donald Trump said during an event last month. \u201cI said, don\u2019t worry about it. It doesn\u2019t matter what I say. I couldn\u2019t care less. If I mispronounce it or not, I couldn\u2019t care less.\u2019\u201d This week, Trump also wrote her name as \u201cKamabla\u201d in several social media posts.<\/p>\n
And while the correct enunciation of South Asian names might not come easy for some, many scholars see the mispronunciations by her political opponents as a political strategy aimed at othering her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do think it\u2019s a deliberate attempt to emphasize that her name is \u2018different\u2019 and hence \u2018foreign,\u2019\u201d said Shilpa Dav\u00e9, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. \u201cIt\u2019s like reducing a person to a caricature, a stereotype.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rita Kohli, a professor at the School of Education at University of California at Riverside, said it\u2019s not like Republicans and Trump have not heard of the name Kamala or don\u2019t know how to say it. Harris is a public leader who has taken time to explain her name, Kohli said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey want the public to feel like she is not from here, that her name is \u201cforeign,\u201d that she is an \u201cother,\u201d and thus, unfit to be an American president,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Kohli and a colleague, Daniel G. Sol\u00f3rzano, researched mispronunciation of names of people of color in schools and argued that they are \u201cracial micro aggressions \u2014 subtle daily insults that, as a form of racism, support a racial and cultural hierarchy of minority inferiority.\u201d<\/p>\n
To be sure, Harris is not the only one to face this line of attack and Trump has often deployed this tactic against opponents. He has referred to Nikki Haley \u2014 an Indian American who ran as a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, and who served as his U.N. ambassador \u2014 by her first name, Nimarata, as \u201cNimbra\u201d or \u201cNimrada.\u201d Haley, who was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, has said she has gone by Nikki since she was a young child.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, some Harris supporters in the Indian American community have promoted Kamala by noting that \u201clotus\u201d and \u201cPOTUS\u201d rhyme.<\/p>\n
In case you didn\u2019t know\u2026#KamalaHarris2024 #Kamala @VP @POTUS pic.twitter.com\/uo9bpxAu4u<\/p>\n
\u2014 Abhay Dandekar, MD FAAP (@abhaydandekar) July 22, 2024<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Vice President Kamala Harris could become the most powerful person in the world, if she wins the presidential election in November. Despite the fact she has been in public life for years and explained how to pronounce her first name, many people still get it wrong. Since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7602,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}