Caribbean Diaspora Celebrates Kamala Harris: 'Immense Sense of Pride'
'Immense sense of pride': Caribbean diaspora celebrates Kamala Harris. Some hopeful vice-president could forward the fight for voting rights of the more than 4 million American citizens living in US territories who can’t vote. The Guardian, Jan. 24, 2021.
As she watched America’s inauguration ceremony last week, Aziza Jones switched back and forth between her social media and her television, hoping the extra energy use didn’t generate a power outage – a setback she said can be common in St Croix, US Virgin Islands. From her home, the non-profit worker thought of her parents as she witnessed Kamala Harris – the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India - become the United States’ first vice-president of Caribbean descent.
“Everyone was excited to have another Caribbean woman fighting for us,” she said, pinpointing the Virgin Islands congresswoman Stacey Plaskett as the other. “My parents would have wanted to vote for her so it was like making their dream come true.”
As residents of the Caribbean territory, Jones’s parents are among the more than 100,000 Virgin Islanders who even as American citizens, are ineligible to vote in the general election. She said casting her absentee ballot as a resident of Illinois felt like giving them a voice. In cities such as New York, Miami and Boston, the historic milestone saw many Caribbean Americans spend their inauguration day honoring Harris in family group and WhatsApps chats – similar to many Indian American celebrations shared on what is sometimes called Desi Twitter. For a diaspora representing a region of 45 million Caribbean people, including countries such as Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba and Guyana, the buzz signified that an American voting bloc some have considered overlooked was finally getting due recognition.
“There was an immense sense of pride from all over,” said Shurland Oliver, an organizer with Vote Caribbean, a Washington DC-based voter advocacy group. “Caribbean Americans saw [Harris] as one of our own – a symbol of the excellence we can achieve.”
According to Migration Policy Institute, the Caribbean diaspora in the US consists of more than 8 million people who were either born in the region or reported having ancestry of a given Caribbean country, including an estimated 4.4 million immigrants. More than 90% come from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. That growing diaspora of Caribbean American voters was a bloc Joe Biden’s campaign sought to engage, primarily in battleground states like Florida and Georgia where their population growth has worked to strengthen Black voter turnout.
In Georgia, Caribbean voters in the state’s Senate runoff helped steer turnout to records numbers, securing victories for the newly sworn-in Democratic senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
“It’s about that exposure,” Oliver said. “We’re mistakenly lumped into the same groups as African Americans when politicians have needed to engage with our communities in ways that speak to our unique cultures. “With [Kamala Harris], they were able to,” he said.
Vote Caribbean led get-out-the-vote efforts throughout communities in urban, Democratic strongholds, including with Virgin Islanders in Georgia, Haitian Americans in south Florida, and Jamaican Americans in Pennsylvania...
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/24/kamala-harris-caribbean-diaspora-celebrates-vice-president