Kamala Harris because the first Black woman and first Asian-American due to her Indian heritage, to be elected as the US Vice President. However, a lecturer from Cornell claims that she was fired from her post after suggesting Harris succeeded due to her mother’s Indian caste.
Cornell Tech visiting lecturer and researcher J. Khadijah Abdurahman said that she was fired by her Associate Professor Tapan Parikh over a disagreement that surfaced on social media. Abdurahman shared a post on the online platform Medium with a gif of Harris sipping tea in making her claim that Harris was able to get elected vice president because of her “immense social privilege.”
Abdurahman said she shared the photo on Twitter in an effort to call out what she referred to as South Asian “anti-blackness” while speaking out against the ethnic cleansing occurring in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. This was in defense of another colleague’s syllabus that centered on black and indigenous scholars. According to Abdurahman, her post sparked backlash from Parikh, who blasted her with “racist direct messages.”
“The politics here might not be immediately legible, but Harris’s ascension to the second-highest office in the United States is inextricably linked to the immense social privilege she inherited by being born to a Tamil Brahman mother, extensive career as a prosecutor, and her mandate to create a Bureau of Children’s Justice which might be the Clinton Crime Bill of our era in its ambitious expansion of juvenile detention and child protective services,” wrote Abdurahman.
In other news, Harris is set to speak with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammatei on Monday, according to Axios. They will be discussing possible solutions to the migration surge, according to a White House official. Their conversation, which will be held virtually, comes ahead of Harris’s upcoming visit to the region in June.
Harris said last week that she plans to visit Mexico and Guatemala as soon as possible, with Joe Biden previously appointing her to lead the efforts to stem the immigration issue. This is part of her efforts to address the root causes of migration to the southern border, which many Republicans have been quick to criticize Harris for.