“You Think You Just Fell Out Of A Coconut Tree?”

Passing of the torch

This was a summer of wild twists and turns in U.S. politics. Facing mounting pressure from his own party after his debacle in the presidential debate with former President Donald J. Trump, President Joe Biden ended his reelection bid and quickly endorsed his vice president to take on Trump.

The “passing of the torch” happened very fast.

Almost immediately, Vice President Kamala Harris’ popularity soared, so much so that it felt as though President Biden had been forgotten. Her vivaciousness and deftness injected megawatts of “joy” and exuberance into a campaign that had seemed to have lost its luster. Democrats, of all leanings, coalesced around her and just like that, she became their presidential nominee.

This past July, Harris’ campaign spent more than triple of what Trump’s campaign had spent on advertising—$81 million compared with $24 million.

How fortunes change.

Her mother’s daughter

Just five years ago, in January of 2019, Harris, then a freshman senator from California, had announced that she was running for president on the ABC show, “Good Morning America.” On grounds that she didn’t have enough funds to stay in the fray, she quit that December. In March of 2020, she endorsed the then Vice President, Joe Biden, who later put her on his ticket.

Move the clock forward, to this August. Standing before jubilant throngs of people at a cavernous indoor arena, Harris accepted her nomination as the Democratic presidential nominee. She began that speech by speaking about who she is, how she grew up, and where she grew up.

And in those remarks, her mom featured in a big way. Harris said that her mom traveled from India to California, “alone,” with an “unshakable dream” to “cure breast cancer.” She spoke of her courage, her equanimity, and her fight for women’s health. She went on to share that she and her younger sibling Maya Harris were raised mostly by her mom after her parents’ marriage broke up.

Her mom worked “long hours” and one of the valuable lessons she taught Harris was to “never to complain about injustice, but do something about it.” “And never do anything half-assed.”

Harris doesn’t hide her love and respect for her mom.

The coconut tree meme

Interestingly, soon after President Biden dropped out of the race and backed her, it was, in fact, one of her mom’s quotes, which, resurfaced, catapulted into a meme, and went viral on social media.

Know this one? “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”

This sentence has struck a chord with the young, the young at heart, and yes, politicians, too. Where did it come from? From a speech made by Harris in May of 2023 at the swearing-in ceremony of commissioners for the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics.

The event was a serious one. The venue was an august one: the Treaty Room of the White House.

Yet, a fun nugget still managed to emerge out of something that could only have only a drab affair.

What Harris had meant to convey was that people don’t exist in vacuum and that they don’t appear out of nowhere. “None of us just live in a silo. Everything is in context.”

The reference to the “coconut tree” also needs to be placed in “context.”

Harris’ mom, Shyamala Gopalan, a biomedical researcher, was Indian. She was born in the southernmost Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which is home to beautiful temples and of course, dreamy coconut trees.

Black, Indian, & Both

Kamala Harris talks a lot about her Indian mom. But when it came to choosing her racial identity, she chose her dad’s, who is Black. Donald J. Harris is a Jamaican-born economist.

Her Republican rival raised that question when he met with Black journalists at their annual convention.

Trump said, “I didn’t know she was Black, until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now, she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

In an interview with CNN, Dana Bash asked Harris to respond to that comment. Her response wasn’t expansive. “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please,” she said.

When Bash pressed on, “That’s it?” Harris repeated, “That’s it.”

A question of identity

Bash concluded that interview with a question about what race and gender meant to her. She asked Harris about a photograph that showed one of the youngest members of her family, a little girl, looking up at Harris in awe as she accepted the nomination on the stage.

Harris told Bash: “You know, I—listen, I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender. But I did see that photograph. And I was deeply touched by it. And you’re right, she’s—it’s the back of her head and her two little braids and—and then I’m in the front of the photograph obviously speaking. It’s very humbling. It’s very humbling in many ways.”

Evidently, Harris doesn’t like to focus on her race, but that she’s Black, she has made known.

Not everyone sees her as a Black woman, though.

Former Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, wrote on X that Harris has leaned into one or the other of her two racial identities for the sake of political expediency. Back when she was running for office in California, she “leaned into her Indian heritage.” Now, she’s cast that aside and leaned into her Black identity.

Cooking with Kamala

Harris has impressive culinary talent. When she was running for president, back in 2020, she leveraged those skills to connect with the foodie crowd by creating a cookery show on YouTube called “Cooking with Kamala,” where she would banter over baking a batch of cookies or frying bacon with apples or making a tuna melt sandwich.

There’s one such video with the Indian-American actress and comedian, Mindy Kaling.

In that video, Kaling starts by telling the watchers that together, they’re going to prepare an Indian dish—masala dosa—because they’re both Indian. And they’re both South Indian. Harris nods, “yes,” “yes” “yes” and tells Kaling that she looks like the “entire one half of my family.”

For many Americans in the middle of the country, though, who spoke with India Currents, Harris is neither Indian nor Black.

K. Davis, who lives in Texas, said that she considers Harris to be “bi-racial.” Mickie Roberts, who calls South Dakota her home, echoed that opinion as well. She’s a person of “mixed-race,” Roberts said.

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