Finding Shared Resonances in the Wake of the 2020 Presidential Election
November 3rd, 2020
On an unusually beautiful 70-degree day with soaring clear blue skies, my family and I celebrated as one by one news outlets began calling Joe Biden Jr's victory in Pennsylvania, pushing his electoral vote count above 270 and cinching the presidency. My family lives outside Philadelphia in Montgomery County––where Biden won approximately 62.5% of the vote. As we traded stories of sleepless nights and doom-scrolling on Twitter, I could feel myself retreating internally, as if to step back and peer into what was, and continues to be, the epicenter of the 2020 presidential election.
I have been working and living in West Philadelphia since early August for a local nonprofit that helps Pennsylvanians access affordable health insurance and concurrently have a hand in healthcare policy reform. In my first months on board, I was tasked with calling folks from across the state in a final voter registration push. The link between Public Health and electoral politics became overwhelmingly clear to me as I spoke with farmers in Lancaster and teachers in Erie, and doctors in Pittsburgh. I have never heard so much fear and anger met in equal measures with hope and compassion. I spoke to people who have lost loved ones to COVID; I talked to people who have lost their jobs to COVID. Many reflected on the feelings of shock, awe, and in some cases, the exhilaration when Pennsylvania turned red in 2016. As a sophomore in college, I watched my campus go into a deep mourning that cast a pall over the remainder of my education. With that in mind, I vowed to do whatever I could in the final stages of the election to make sure Pennsylvania turned blue. And that's just what we did.
My reverie is interrupted, and I am brought back to the present moment. Sitting around the table with my family––three generations of Indian-Americans–– I can't help but think of how far we have come in the last one hundred years and how much more we have to do. I look over at my uncle and grandmother, both naturalized citizens who voted by mail-in ballot, and I am reminded of the 1923 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Bhagat Singh Thind case that South Asians were ineligible for naturalized U.S. citizenship. I think about the factors that allowed my family and many others to come to the U.S., and I am reminded of the 1965 Immigration Act that abolished national origins quotas of the 1920s (all the while reifying selection based on professional status, prioritizing scientists, engineers, physicians, and leaving behind so many).
As South Asians in America, we often fail to see that our very existence here is tied to the dogged work of Civil Rights activists. Their struggle for justice and equality paved the way for our path to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness here. Looking at our V.P. elect Kamala Harris, many may see something of us in her— a woman, a black or Indian person, the child of a single mother. I want to urge us to look beyond the surface-level details to search for those shared resonances—to dig deep and see how our struggles are intrinsically linked. If we have learned anything from this pandemic, our health and well-being is invisibly but tangibly tied to our neighbor's. If we have learned anything from the uprisings this summer and the Black Lives Matter movement, we can no longer stay quiet as black people are killed by police and a complicit justice system. If we have learned anything from Trump's presidency, we cannot afford to be complacent in the face of jingoism and pseudoscience. Carrying these lessons in our hearts and minds, we look to the future, mobilized.
This is just the beginning.