I am of mixed race. My DNA spans a quarter of the planet, yet I cannot do so myself without my identity being questioned. Perhaps because of the way I appear or the way I dress, I have been asked for proof of my nationality at the gates of the Taj Mahal in my home country. Once, a bored local official in a small town in India leafed through my Indian passport and, with an air of having checkmated me, said, “Where’s your proof of citizenship?”
While I have been conscious of these questions for most of my adult life, and having covered many essentially identity-based issues and conflicts as a journalist — including separatist movements, ethnic massacres, and pogroms — I was never so acutely aware of issues of identity as when I arrived in Washington, D.C., in October 2016 as a foreign correspondent for an Asian paper, The Straits Times of Singapore.
It was the height of the U.S. presidential campaign, with identity politics front and center, most visibly over the question of immigration.
This is partly because the United States is an open society, where ideas are openly expressed and contested. And while immigration is the foundation of the United States, it has also been a point of contention since the country’s origins, with waves of prejudice against immigrants of all kinds — Catholics, Irish, Italians, Japanese, Chinese, and most recently, Indians. By 2016, a new word, birtherism, had entered the dictionaries — the theory that Barack Obama, the incumbent president when I arrived, had not been born in the United States (for the record, he was born in Hawaii).
Doubts over Obama’s birthplace, laden with racist undercurrents, had been political fodder since the early 2000s. But Trump amplified them, pouring gasoline on long-smoldering coals of discontent. In 2024, he questioned his rival’s ethnic identity; Kamala Harris, then vice president, is half Indian and half Jamaican-American.
Ethnonationalism and identity politics are not limited to the United States; they are on the rise across half the planet, a backlash to immigration, migration, and globalization—stoked by populist politicians.
In his 2004 book Who Are We?, which addressed challenges to America’s national identity, Harvard University’s Samuel Huntington noted that “Crises of national identity have become a global phenomenon.”
In his 2018 book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Stanford University’s Francis Fukuyama wrote, “Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that