Sen. Kamala Harris’s meteoric rise in the Democratic Party has generated an endless stream of articles and conversations in the United States about her multifaceted identity as a black and Indian American woman, a heritage she will no doubt highlight during the upcoming vice presidential debate. Yet one of the most interesting conversations about Harris is happening not in the U.S., but in India.

Harris’s family, from her mother’s side, belongs to India’s Brahmin caste. In contrast to the history of black people’s slavery under white oppression, the history of Brahmins is underwritten by centuries of enslaving many millions of others.

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