Rep. Ro Khanna Schools Vivek Ramaswamy On Civil Rights Movement

Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) isn’t throwing any punches when it comes to Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The California Congressman, who debated Ramaswamy last month, said he felt compelled to counter his ahistorical view of race and racism in the United States.

Rep. Khanna sat down with The Root for The 411 to talk about the Indian American connection to the civil rights movement, Ramaswamy, Gaza, and so much more.

“We have such a different perspective about race and the history of the Indian American community,” said Rep. Khanna. “Vivek Ramaswamy has a view that history sort of started the day he was born.”

Rep. Khanna said that Indian Americans owe a lot to the civil rights movement led by Black leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “My view is that my parents wouldn’t be in America if it weren’t for the civil rights movement. That led to the immigration reform act of 1965. That’s what allowed Indian Americans and Chinese Americans to come to the United States. Before that, immigration was heavily favored towards the Europeans.”

The cross-cultural connections were mutual. “We as an Indian American community owe a huge debt to the civil rights movement,” he said, “which was inspired by Gandhi and the Indian independence movement, in which my grandfather took part in.”

Rep. Khanna also weighed in on the controversy over Ramaswamy’s suggestion to mandate a civics test for Americans under 25 who want to vote, along with a few other non-test-related exemptions.

“We’ve seen that story before with a civics test, that you can’t vote if you’re under 25 if you can’t pass a test,” said Rep. Khanna. “I mean, we saw how those tests were distorted to deny people the right to vote in the South and deny Black people the right to vote, to deny people of color the right to vote. And so it’s outrageous that he’s proposing something like that today.”

The California Congressman says he thinks Ramaswamy has “blinders on” when it comes to racism in the United States. In addition to the suggested civics test, Ramaswamy has denied the existence of white supremacy.

“I think he thinks that we have overcome racial bias in this country,” said Khanna. “Race is still a major fact. You can’t have 250 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow and think that [racism] somehow has disappeared.”

In the second part of our interview with the Congressman, we discussed his support for a Ceasefire and the silencing of POC Voices.