People have mispronounced Kamala Harris’s name for years. Here’s how to say it.

Vice President Kamala Harris could become the most powerful person in the world, if she wins the presidential election in November. Despite the fact she has been in public life for years and explained how to pronounce her first name, many people still get it wrong.

Since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed her to be the Democratic nominee, there has been an uptick in racialized and gendered attacks on Harris and many of them have targeted her name, including by pronouncing it incorrectly. She’s been called KAH-mala, KUH-mala, Kah-MAL-a, Kuh-MEL-a and Camel-a.

But the correct way to say Kamala is, in fact, Comma-La.

Kamala is a common and popular female name in India, from where Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan immigrated to the United States. It means “lotus” in Sanskrit and the flower holds deep symbolism in Indian culture, representing purity and beauty.

“A lotus grows underwater, its flower rising above the surface while its roots are planted firmly in the river bottom,” Harris wrote in her 2019 autobiography, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.”

Her middle name, Devi (DAY-vee), is the Sanskrit word for goddess. It is typically attached as a suffix to women’s names in India as a mark of respect.

Harris, the California-born daughter of a Jamaican father and a south Indian mother, has said that she grew up steeped in Black culture and causes, and also has embraced her Indian heritage.

Through years of her public life, Harris has often had to step in to explain how to say her first name. When she first ran for Senate in 2016, her campaign released an ad featuring children elucidating the right and wrong pronunciations. In 2019, she explained it on television in an appearance on Whoopi Goldberg’s “The View” and corrected co-host Joy Behar who suggested the name was like Pamela, “like we’re used to.”

But that hasn’t stopped her opponents from repeatedly butchering her name — whether by mistake or intentionally. Nearly half of the speakers at the Republican National Convention in July pronounced it incorrectly. One speaker, Goya Foods CEO Robert Unanue, called her “Que-mala,” which sounds like “so bad” in Spanish. (GOP vice-presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), whose wife Usha is Indian American, pronounced Kamala correctly.)

“They were explaining to me, ‘You can say KA-ma-la. You can say Ka-MA-la,’” former president Donald Trump said during an event last month. “I said, don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter what I say. I couldn’t care less. If I mispronounce it or not, I couldn’t care less.’” This week, Trump also wrote her name as “Kamabla” in several social media posts.

And while the correct enunciation of South Asian names might not come easy for some, many scholars see the mispronunciations by her political opponents as a political strategy aimed at othering her.

“I do think it’s a deliberate attempt to emphasize that her name is ‘different’ and hence ‘foreign,’” said Shilpa Davé, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. “It’s like reducing a person to a caricature, a stereotype.”

Rita Kohli, a professor at the School of Education at University of California at Riverside, said it’s not like Republicans and Trump have not heard of the name Kamala or don’t know how to say it. Harris is a public leader who has taken time to explain her name, Kohli said.

“They want the public to feel like she is not from here, that her name is “foreign,” that she is an “other,” and thus, unfit to be an American president,” she said.

Kohli and a colleague, Daniel G. Solórzano, researched mispronunciation of names of people of color in schools and argued that they are “racial micro aggressions — subtle daily insults that, as a form of racism, support a racial and cultural hierarchy of minority inferiority.”

To be sure, Harris is not the only one to face this line of attack and Trump has often deployed this tactic against opponents. He has referred to Nikki Haley — an Indian American who ran as a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, and who served as his U.N. ambassador — by her first name, Nimarata, as “Nimbra” or “Nimrada.” Haley, who was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, has said she has gone by Nikki since she was a young child.

In the meantime, some Harris supporters in the Indian American community have promoted Kamala by noting that “lotus” and “POTUS” rhyme.

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