The drama of election night came down to ballots being counted in Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett and Cobb counties – Atlanta suburbs that have all seen large population growth among people of color. After close defeats in the 2016 presidential election and Senate race, the Democrats finally squeaked to victory in 2020, winning Georgia for Joe Biden and wresting control of both Senate seats for the first time since the mid-1970s. Recently, that non-white majority has played a pivotal role in overturning Georgia’s Republican control, registering to vote in the hundreds of thousands.
On television, Atlanta’s prosperous non-white coalition is reflected in programs such as Married to Medicine, in which an Indian-American plastic surgeon and his fashion blogger wife feature prominently within the show’s Black American ensemble.
In a 2021 essay, author Sanjena Sathian, whose critically acclaimed novel Gold Diggers follows an Indian-American teen in Atlanta, characterized her hometown as “a surprisingly Whitmanesque experiment in pluralism, in which unpoetic concrete strip malls substitute for lyrical spears of summer grass”. The city is more obviously international now than it has ever been: the Confederate banners and whites-only placards have long since been replaced by Ethiopian restaurants, West Indian markets and businesses touting Spanish proficiency. Most hailed from India and Pakistan, enticed by the city’s booming academic, medical and tech industries. As Atlanta’s Black population has gradually recovered population share, wealth and civil rights after decades of domestic terrorism and redlining policies, the city’s Asian American population has exploded, too.Īs of the most recent census, Asian Americans comprised nearly 5% of metro Atlanta’s 6 million residents, putting them nearly level with the city’s Latino population. Between 19 roughly 80,000 people immigrated here, many from Asia, where they settled in the suburbs of Atlanta – counties like Clayton, Fulton and Forsyth, which gained national infamy in the 1980s as a sundown town after a spate of Klan attacks against civil rights activists. Georgia went blue in the 2020 election – and Asian American voters could well decide whether that was an accident or the new normal. Immigrants like Vaishnav have played an important role in what has been a remarkable shift in the demographics of Georgia, and politics with it. It’s a balancing act that you get better at over time.” “Are you American? Are you Indian? You have to get comfortable knowing the two cultures. “The biggest thing I struggled with growing up and that I still see in my son are the identity conflicts,” Vaishnav says, now 50. For the past five years, he’s worked in the local district attorney’s office and this year he ran to be a state judge in Forsyth county, once infamous for its lynchings. But he joined the school’s air force junior reserves, studied mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech and earned his law degree from Georgia State. Vaishnav was one of two Indian kids in school – the other was his brother – and a strict vegetarian who spoke Gujarati at home. When his parents settled in Clayton county – a suburb south of downtown that’s now home to the world’s busiest airport – it was still largely populated by white families living in 60s-era bungalows before that, it was the fictional setting for Gone With the Wind. He moved to the city at the age of nine, after immigrating to the US from India in the late 1970s. “V ery normal” is how Rupal Vaishnav describes his experience as an entrenched resident of Atlanta.
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