But her name — Sharda — always gave her away.
All her life, Sekaran has searched for other “Blindians” — people with one Black and one Indian parent. The closest she came was the couple in “Mississippi Masala,” she says, a 1991 movie about a Black man and an Indian woman who fall in love.
In 2010, she says, she heard about a woman running for attorney general in California. She looked Black. But her name gave her away.
Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris will make history in a lot of different ways when she is inaugurated on Jan. 20. The daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, she will be the first Black vice president and the first Indian American vice president, as well as the first woman to hold elected office in the White House. Her racial identities are often discussed separately, heralded as a win for two different groups. But Harris also exists at a unique cultural intersection: Both Black and Indian, she will elevate a community that has struggled for acceptance in a country where few people share their background.