The many identities of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris amount to this: A proud American

Kamala Harris is “Black” and “Indian American” according to the official Biden-Harris campaign website; “African American” and “South Asian American” according to her senator for California government site; and, depending on the news outlet and its hyphen preferences, she is also: Black American, Jamaican American, Caribbean American, Asian American and Indian American, and of Asian descent, Indian origin, mixed Indian and Jamaican heritage and Tamil and Hindu roots.

On Nov. 7, standing before cheering supporters and their exuberant car horns in Wilmington, Delaware, but more important before an exhausted, divided country, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris did not reach for any of these terms to describe herself in her history-making acceptance speech. Why? Because the speech was not about her. Because the moment belonged not to a woman but to a nation of women. Because the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote was ratified 100 years ago, and the best way to celebrate was to say thank you to the matriarchs of American democracy.

A long lineage of women

Acknowledging first her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, an immigrant who “came here from India,” Harris then invited up to the podium with her, as it were, “the generations of women — Black women.” Pausing there not for breath but for emphasis and to allow for the long-overdue applause to roll in, which it did, Harris resumed the honor roll, “Asian, White, Latina, and Native American women throughout our nation’s history who have paved the way for this moment tonight.”

This was when I began to cry.

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After four years of being bombarded by megalomaniacal hate speech and hate tweets passed off as political oration and discourse, I was hearing something entirely different. In place of unsubstantiated boasting and self-centeredness, here was history-based gratitude and respect for the achievement of others. This was “identity politics” as I understood it: a celebration of our country’s racial and ethnic diversity as a hallmark strength, not as a cancer upon the republic.

Harris reached for race and ethnic descriptors only to unfurl them — like a patchwork quilt and a superhero cape — onto the shoulders of the women who made it possible for her to be on the national stage that night, a beacon in suffragette white, her pantsuit a poignant reminder of another history-making moment delayed.

An American identity

I heard Harris’ words, and I understood their intent: to shine the spotlight not on herself and her own remarkable biography, but to shine that light back on us and our foremothers: “Black women (who) are the backbone of our democracy,” and “all the women” who have organized, marched, voted, ran for office and lost, and who will run for office and win.

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Whenever the vice president-elect chooses to highlight her noteworthy multiracial identity again, she can clearly check off many boxes. Here is another that she can rightfully claim: American.

We who call ourselves “American” do so, not in lieu of our race or ethnicity, not to override our family’s country of origin, or to forget our own histories — indigenous to this land; came here to settle and to colonize; brought here as enslaved persons; immigrated here; came here as refugees, as my family and I did 45 years ago; naturalized here; born here — but precisely because we are a nation of “all of the above,” and that is the box that 79 million U.S. citizens and counting chose when we voted for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.

Monique Truong is a Vietnamese American novelist, essayist, librettist and intellectual property attorney based in Brooklyn, New York. Her most recent novel is "The Sweetest Fruits."

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kamala Harris is Black, Indian, Jamaican — and most important, American