Saira Rao is an exemplar of her generation, a famous and somewhat notorious Indian-American woman among the ‘very online’ set. An erstwhile Democratic politician two years ago, by the start of the year Rao had become an anti-racist activist best known for regularly trending on Twitter and charging white women $2,500 to harangue them on matters of race over dinner and drinks. Rao is also co-author of the forthcoming White Women: Everything You Already Know about Your Own Racism and How to Get Better, after securing a deal with major publishing house Penguin Random House.
She is very good at what she does. But, then, making money runs in Rao’s family — as it does with many Indian activists in the United States, who have become leaders in the battle against ‘white supremacy’.
Though it is true that in many ways Rao is atypical, and almost a caricature of the sort of activist found on social media, she reflects important visible strands of the Indian-American experience. The daughter of upper-caste southern Indian immigrants to the United States, her parents were doctors, which is not exceptional since nearly one out of every 20 doctors in the United States is of Indian origin, and somewhere in the region of one in 20 Indian Americans has a medical degree.
Not surprisingly, the median Indian-American household income is nearly twice that of white Americans, and as well as medicine many others are in prestigious, highly-paid industry — including Sara Rao’s husband, who works in finance and private equity.
Across the English-speaking world, and in particular the United States, people of Indian origin, and South Asians more broadly, are becoming more culturally influential. This is quite a turnaround; in the 1980s the most prominent person of South Asian origin depicted in American pop culture was Ben Jabituya in the Short Circuit sequel, played by Fisher Stevens, a white actor. Today, in contrast, there is an embarrassment of riches: comedians such as Aziz Ansari and Mindy Kaling; politicians such as Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley; television doctors such as Sanjay Gupta.
Though there are many examples of Indian Americans on the political Right, namely Haley, Ajit Pai or Seema Verma in the Trump administration, most of the public figures today are Democrats. Pramila Jayapal is a hard-left member of the Democratic Party representing a district in Washington state; though her colleague Ro Khanna represents Silicon Valley, and began his career as a member of the pro-business faction of the party, he also co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s recent campaign for President; Sanders’s campaign manager was Faiz Shakir, a Pakistani-American. Indian-American adjacent, as it were.
The Center for American Progress, the major Democrat-leaning think-tank in Washington, D.C., is led by an Indian-American, Neera Tanden, while Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s long-time influential chief of staff was Saikat Chakrabarti, who left to head Left-wing pressure groups in the party.
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