The First Black, Indian American, Asian American, Caribbean Daughter of Immigrants on a Presidential Ticket
Or, Navigating the Tension between Pragmatism and Inspiration
This is the second in a series on Ladies in Leadership. Read the first on Girlbosses , and peek at a subscriber bonus where I break down gender and leadership models.
In their first year in the US, my Dutch-Indonesian parents were invited to a Super Bowl party. They knew little about the Super Bowl, and since this was long before the internet, they just went by the name. Super! Sounds fancy! My dad brushed off a suit and my mom chose a nice dress. As is the custom in the Netherlands, they brought flowers. They found a sitter for me, drove to their new friend’s house, and were greeted with a healthy dose of culture shock. Everyone was in sweats and jeans with cans of beer balanced on their bellies, munching on chips and yelling at the TV. I can picture my parents, standing in the doorway of a suburban Michigan home in their finest, speechless at this unfamiliar ritual of Americana.
These types of anecdotes are the lifeblood of living across cultures. These funny stories hide the other moments--the frustrations when my mother’s Masters degree didn’t get recognized and she had to start school from scratch, the bizarreness of navigating America’s complex medical system, the constant mispronunciations and misspellings of our names. And there was no one—in my town, on TV, in places of leadership—that reflected our experience.
Kamala Harris’s parents, from India and Jamaica
Pronounced Comma-la
This week, Biden announced his VP pick, Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants, an Indian woman and a Jamaican man.
I was initially skeptical (and I’ll reserve my political viewpoints for Twitter), but after a glass of wine or two, I let myself luxuriate in her identity. Her story of an immigrant childhood and mixed-race background reflected mine. She bears a name some still can’t—or won’t—pronounce, grew up with foreign foods that seem to offend, and intimately knows customs, histories, and words beyond America’s.
When women like her succeed, I feel validated as an American. I’m not alone in this; Manisha Sinha, an Indian American professor of African American history, says:
I, like millions of Americans, especially African-Americans, immigrants and other people of color, felt, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, that “we were eight years in power.” After the shock of Donald Trump’s ascendance, the rise to national prominence of Kamala Harris, only the second Black woman to be elected to the Senate, has been therapeutic.
This is, after all, the story of America that Barack Obama excelled at articulating. One in which a person can come from anywhere in the world and raise a son or daughter to be President. One in which a single mother can balance caring for a family and working towards her dreams. One in which opportunity is meted out equally to a rainbow of backgrounds and skin tones. Of course, Obama’s America was different than Trump’s America, one in which color lines are drawn in tear gas and blood, one fueled by hate not hope.
Don’t Get Her Wrong: Transformational vs Transactional Leadership
Even though it’s easy to see echoes of Obama’s story in Kamala Harris, she’s quite different. And I worry, as I always do, that women, especially women of color, will be measured by a different ruler.
In the last newsletter, I wrote about the Girlboss, gender expectations, and agentic/communal leadership dichotomy. This time, I want to examine another model of leadership: the transformational / transactional dichotomy. A summary of the two forms here:
Transformational leaders offer a purpose that transcends short-term goals and focuses on higher order intrinsic needs. Transactional leaders, in contrast, focus on the proper exchange of resources. If transformational leadership results in followers identifying with the needs of the leader, the transactional leader gives followers something they want in exchange for something the leader wants.
Transactional leadership is pragmatic, whereas transformational leadership is inspirational. Obama was a quintessential transformational leader—he held up lofty ideals, and his way of getting things done was to unite and inspire.
Kamala Harris is already being viewed this way, in comparison to Barack Obama and with a desire for a truly inspirational leader. Frank Bruni at the New York Times writes about his disappointment in her presence:
[In her announcement] she frequently zoomed past the poetry to the prose, more a steely lawyer rattling off lists than a soulful leader serving up inspiration.
Harris the prosecutor can find the holes in your argument and make you tremble. But can Harris the history-making vice-presidential candidate find the cracks in your heart and make you cry?
When we view someone’s achievements through the lens of identity, we see a transformational leader. They’ve broken barriers and done things no one has done before. There’s data that shows that women tend to be more transformational and less transactional as leaders, and that leaders from ethnic minorities also tend to be viewed as more transformational. Ms. Harris is a litany of transformational firsts on the Presidential ticket: first Black woman, first Asian American woman, first Indian woman, first child of two immigrants.
Yet in the way she leads, Kamala has shown herself to be more transactional, living in the give-and-take of politics. She’s been repeatedly painted as a pragmatist. Many of her inspirational moments are not from uplifting speeches, but from Senate hearings, where she delivers pointed questions to get at the answers (or damning non-answers) she wants. I’ve seen her falter a little in interviews and in townhalls where she’s shows up to kill when she’s expected to charm.
I am proud of making a decision to not just give fancy speeches or be in a legislative body and give speeches on the floor, but actually doing the work of being in the position to use the power that I had to reform a system that is badly in need of reform.
And according to this opinion in The Atlantic:
Like all frameworks, this dichotomy of leadership characteristics is just a tool, and doesn’t reflect the complexity of a full person. All leaders, especially the political ones that are taking up a lot of air time right now, flex different facets of transformational and transactional behaviors as needed. But these are models that shape our perceptions and expectations—especially of leaders who are big Firsts and are the spearhead of possibility for the rest of us.
No matter how you feel about the Biden/Harris ticket, there will be much to learn about how a more transactional leader navigates a transformational role. Just by being who she is, Kamala has already transformed what’s possible for so many women of color. But if we expect inspiration and she (or any other leader) delivers pragmatism, it’s helpful to check the model of our expectations.
A couple relevant reads:
A deep dive into how the VP was chosen. See if you can identify different leadership models.
Shayla Lawson on being Black in the ad industry—where tokenism overshadows getting work done.
Former COO Francoise Brougher on discrimination at Pinterest. Here’s a quote relevant to today’s topic:
When [a woman] is recognized for bringing diversity, while her male peer is commended for his operational achievements, that again is gender discrimination.
I’ve built out bonus frameworks for paid subscribers that break down leadership dichotomies further; take a sneak peek here.
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