Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris (1964- ), attorney and politician. Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, the daughter of immigrants. Although laws dating back to the 1790s had discouraged or banned racial minorities from coming to the country or becoming citizens, people from the West Indies and Asia had come anyway. In Jamaica the black majority had created a tradition of entrepreneurialism and political activism, and this was carried on by Jamaican immigrants to the U.S., including an economist named Donald Harris. This spirit was also prevalent in the Indian American community, which grew primarily on the West Coast beginning in the late 1800s and featured many young people attending American universities, including a medical student of Tamil ancestry named Shyamala Gopalan. Although some Indian immigrants tried to assimilate or claim a white identity, Gopalan made connections with the black students at the University of California, Berkeley, where in 1958 she met Harris, who was pursuing a Ph.D. in economics. They married and had two daughters, naming the eldest Kamala after the Sanskrit word for “lotus,” which is associated with the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, and Devi, which literally means “goddess.” As a child Kamala took part in social justice protests with her family, later recalling that she “had a stroller-eye view of the Civil Rights Movement.” Her parents divorced when she was seven, and she was raised primarily by her mother, who instilled pride in her Indian heritage and an identity as a black woman; she later wrote that “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters…She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” The Great Migration had brought millions of African Americans from the South to the West Coast, and Harris spent her early years immersed in this environment. She also remembered that her mother was sometimes mistaken for a domestic servant while they were shopping and that neighbors banned their daughter from playing with her because she was black. She attended both Hindu and Baptist religious services, and she visited family members in Jamaica and India, where she was inspired by her grandparents’ advocacy for women’s rights. She lived in Montreal during her middle and high school years, and this was the site of her first overtly political act: when she was ten, she and her sister convinced the managers of their apartment building to turn a courtyard into a playground, then raised money to build it.
In 1982 Harris began college at Howard University, one of more than one hundred Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). She chose Howard in part because she had been educated in predominantly white schools and, as a journalist later wrote, “[she] wanted to be surrounded by black students, black culture and black traditions at the crown jewel of [HBCUs].” While in college she interned for a California senator, led the debate team and economics society, took part in anti-apartheid protests, and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s oldest black sorority. She later said of her alma mater that “Every signal told students that we could be anything – that we were young, gifted, and black, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of our success.” After graduating with a degree in political science and economics, she studied law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, where she served as president of her chapter of the Black Law Students Association. She was admitted to the California bar in 1990 and took a job as a deputy district attorney in Oakland. Focusing on child sexual assault cases, she helped reform the city’s efforts to fight teenage prostitution by viewing the girls as victims rather than as criminals. She also served on the state boards for unemployment insurance and medical assistance. Harris was then promoted to assistant district attorney and head of the Career Criminal Unit in San Francisco, but after disagreements with her supervisor due to his practice of trying juveniles as adults, she quit in 2000 and became chief of the Community and Neighborhood Division for the San Francisco City Attorney. Three years later she ran for office for the first time, seeking the office of District Attorney of San Francisco on a pledge to never seek the death penalty, combat gun violence, and make limited use of the “three-strikes” law that automatically gave life sentences to repeat offenders. She was elected and then reelected in 2007. During her seven years in this position, she kept her pledge against the death penalty even when more prominent politicians pressured her to use it. She combatted environmental problems by creating a special crime unit and by prosecuting printing companies that dumped hazardous waste in a poor black neighborhood. Her Hate Crimes Unit was created to protect LGBT students at school, and she combatted truancy by bringing charges against parents of chronically truant children, arguing that there was a direct connection between truancy in childhood and criminal behavior in adulthood. She also increased protections for the elderly against identity theft and reduced recidivism among ex-convicts through the “Back on Track” program. At the same time, an increased felony conviction rate led to accusations that she was tough on minority suspects (especially in the area of marijuana offenses), and misdeeds by a crime lab technician forced her to throw out around 1,000 drug-related cases. All of this helped make her one of the most notable DAs in the country, as did her work on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and her 2009 book Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer.
In 2010, Harris ran for California Attorney General. The race was narrower than usual because she supported marriage equality only two years after Californians had approved a state constitutional amendment opposing it. In a foreshadowing of future events, her opponent did well in rural areas while the much larger number of urban votes were still being counted, but in the end Harris had the majority. This made her California’s first black and/or Asian attorney general and the first South Asian attorney general of any state. Upon taking office she began working to help the economy recover from the Great Recession, which had been caused in part by banking practices in home loans. She secured $20 billion in settlements from banks to help homeowners save their properties, having negotiated this amount after the banks initially offered only $4 billion. Her California Homeowner’s Bill of Rights further assisted homeowners and gave her office more power to prosecute financial fraud. She also increased Internet privacy, helped restore marriage equality, and again refused to seek the death penalty, arguing that “one of America’s greatest teachers, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said ‘the old eye for an eye philosophy leaves everyone blind…the district attorney is charged with seeking justice, not vengeance.” Harris served as state attorney general until 2016, when she was elected to the U.S. Senate. This made her only the Senate’s tenth African American, the second black woman (following Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois), and the first from west of the Mississippi River. She was also the Senate’s eighth Asian American, one of three Asian American women, and only one of three from a state other than Hawaii; in the last two categories she was joined by Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. Additionally, although most Indian Americans voted Democrat, the most prominent Indian American politicians were the conservative Republicans Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley, who also used Anglicized names and generally downplayed their heritage. By contrast, Harris insisted upon the correct pronunciation of her name, and she was joined in Congress by progressives Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Raja Krishnamoorthi of the Chicago suburbs, along with two other Indian Americans already representing districts in northern California. Senator Harris was named to the Budget, Homeland Security, Judiciary, and Intelligence committees. Her public profile thus grew even higher as the Intelligence Committee investigated Russian interference in Donald Trump’s recent presidential victory and the Judiciary Committee evaluated his more than 200 nominations for federal judgeships. Harris put her background as a prosecutor to use in questioning witnesses and potential judges such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. She became one of Trump’s fiercest opponents by fighting his nominations, his immigration policies, and other actions, leading him to apply the “nasty” label that he often used on women who displeased him. When he was impeached in 2019 on charges of using military aid to pressure the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and of obstructing justice, Harris was one of the leading voices calling for a fair examination of the facts and then for Trump’s removal, writing “If – when – the Senate fails to hold this president accountable, it will represent a serious risk to the integrity of our system of justice. It will continue a shameful history of two systems of justice: one for powerful people like Trump and one for everyone else.” That same year she also published the children’s book Superheroes Are Everywhere and her biography The Truths We Hold.
2019 was also the year that Harris announced that she was running for president. This position had been sought by Hillary Clinton in 2016 and other women in previous years, by black candidates since the early 1900s, and by black major party candidates since the 1970s (including Shirley Chisholm in 1972 and Braun in 2004) but the only such victor had been Obama in 2008 and 2012. Harris paid tribute to this legacy by beginning her campaign on the same date that Chisholm had begun hers and by using a similar visual scheme in her campaign materials. The pool of Democratic candidates was the largest and most diverse in U.S. history but also included Obama’s former vice president Joe Biden. During the first Democratic debate in June 2019, Harris criticized Biden for having opposed the school desegregation program of busing in the 1970s, saying “There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me!” This helped make her one of the leading candidates for a time, but over the next few months Biden pulled ahead of the field. Harris was seen by some as too moderate by some due to her record as a prosecutor and as too liberal by others due to her criticism of Trump and simply because she was a black woman from California. The majority of Democratic voters (including many African Americans) pragmatically decided that Joe Biden, a moderate white man with a history of working effectively with Republicans, was their party’s best chance to remove Trump from office. Although she had received a record $1.5 million in donations during the first 24 hours of her campaign, by December 2019 she announced that she did not have enough money to continue and that she would support whoever her party nominated. That proved to be Biden, and as the summer of 2020 rolled on, the massive support that he had gotten from black voters and the even more massive protests for social justice led him to openly propose choosing a black woman as his running mate. Several were considered, but in August 2020 he announced that he had selected Harris. This made her the third woman on a major party presidential ticket (following Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Republican Sarah Palin in 2008), the first African American, and the first Asian American. Because of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Harris conducted a mainly virtual campaign that became notable for mobilizing her AKA sisters and members of other black Greek-letter organizations. Trump and other Republicans mocked her and Biden for their infrequent public appearance and accused them of being socialists, although such claims had never been made earlier in their political careers. They also had to contend with backlash to the social justice protests and with the rising Q-Anon movement, which promoted the baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats were secretly carrying out a Satanic plot to kidnap and eat children. The same racist, xenophobic, and sexist attacks that had been used against other Democratic women and Obama were now used against her. Some Republicans claimed that she was not eligible to serve as president because her parents had not been American citizens at the time of her birth (people born in the U.S. are citizens at birth regardless of their parents’ status), while one of her Senate colleagues intentionally and mockingly mispronounced her name. Other conservatives stated that she wasn’t really black because some of her ancestors were white slaveholders, ignoring the fact that most people of African descent in the Americas have white ancestry due to the sexual assault of enslaved women. She was also accused of having used a personal relationship to advance her career, and it was further said that because of Biden’s advanced age, she would be the real president, which Trump himself called an “insult to our country.” Harris responded to all of this by focusing on Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic and other failings. During her debate with Vice President Mike Pence, which generated the second-highest TV ratings of any vice-presidential debate in history, Harris created one of the most memorable moments of the campaign by responding to Pence’s frequent interruptions with the sentence “Mr. Vice President, I'm speaking.”
On Election Day it was not clear who had won, but as the states counted millions of mail-in votes and early votes (in some states these could not be counted in advance) over the next few days, the outcome became apparent. Harris and Biden had won all of the same states as Hillary Clinton in 2016, recaptured Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, turned Georgia blue for the first time since 1992, and turned Arizona blue for only the second time since 1948. They won the Electoral College 306-232, and although their margin of victory in the swing states was close, they also won the popular vote by 7 million and nearly five percent. This was the widest percentage margin of victory over an incumbent president since 1932, and Trump was only the tenth of thirty incumbent presidents to be voted out. In a year which marked the 100th and 150th anniversary of constitutional amendments that removed gender and racial restrictions on voting, Kamala Harris had now broken through the same barriers in the nation’s second-highest office that she had previously smashed in other positions. In her acceptance speech, she declared that “When [my mother] came here from India at the age of 19, maybe she didn’t quite imagine this moment. But she believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible. So, I’m thinking about her and about the generations of women, Black women. Asian, White, Latina, and Native American women throughout our nation’s history who have paved the way for this moment tonight. Women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality, liberty, and justice for all, including the Black women, who are too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy…But while I may be the first woman in this office, I won’t be the last. Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”
©David Brodnax, Sr.
