Senator David Purdue

This week, Georgia Senator David Purdue, warming up the audience for a Trump rally, in Macon, Georgia, pretended he didn’t know how to pronounce the first name of the Democratic vice presidential candidate: “Ka-MA-la, KA-ma-la, Kamala-mala-mala, I don’t know, whatever”

Perdue then warned the crowd of a potential liberal takeover of government with “Bernie and Elizabeth and Kah-mah-la or Kah-ma-la or Kamamboamamla or however you say it.” It should be pointed out that Senator Perdue has served with Kamala Harris in the Senate for 3 years, in fact on the same committee. So he clearly knows how to say her name, but through pretending to have trouble with the pronunciation, he wanted to draw attention to fact that she does not have a familiar first name, from a white American perspective.

In fact, both Harris’ parents were immigrants to the US, with her mother coming from India. They gave her a name that in the original Sanskrit (कमला) means “lotus” or “pale red”. For Harris, her name is a reminder of her heritage. For Purdue, it points to her foreignness, implying through the mocking way he played on her name that there was something not quite right about her. In other words, his words were a clear racist dog whistle, a signal his audience understood quite well, as they laughed along with Purdue.

This is not the first racist action from the Senator. He recently ran an ad, increasing the size of the nose of his Democratic opponent in November, Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish. Purdue has also accused Ossoff and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of trying to “buy Georgia.” In embracing the caricature of Jews with large noses and leveling the scurrilous accusation that Ossoff and Schumer – both Jewish – are trying to buy influence and power, Perdue invoked two of the world’s oldest antisemitic tropes.

This is another troubling sign that open racism has unfortunately become mainstream in many segments of the US population.