Bancroft Way in Berkeley, California, is cold and slow, the kind of street where everyone seems to know each other by name. This week, neighbors sat outside drinking wine and drinking wine under the evening sun while having lively conversations about their childhood friend who had just become headline news.
It was on Bancroft Way that Kamala Harris spent her formative years with her only mother, Shyamala, and sister, Maya. Today, former neighbors are thinking about her following her selection this week as Joe Biden’s Democratic running mate in his bid to oust Donald Trump from the White House.
“I’m really proud of her and think she’s going to make a very good vice president,” Kenneth Hunter said. He was standing on the same street corner, where he said he and Harris picked up the bus every morning for Thousand Oaks Elementary School in North Berkeley as part of an effort to desegregate local schools.
But even here, among her childhood friends, and just days away from the Democratic National Convention, where Harris will introduce the history books as the first woman of color to be placed on a presidential card for big parties, is d ‘r a note of hesitation.
Octavia, a third-generation Berkeley resident who lives on the block, said she feared criticism of Harris ‘record as a former prosecutor could diminish enthusiasm among Black voters, who are a crucial part of’ the Democratic Party.
“Not enough black people behind her,” Octavia said, asking not to give her last name. ‘When people say they do not want to vote for them, I ask,’ How many Black and brown women who look like you and me are in office now? How could you not vote for her? ‘”
That’s a debate that is likely to erupt not only in Berkeley and neighboring Oakland, where Harris was born in 1964, but across California and across the country ahead of the November 3 US presidential election. Just who is Kamala Harris, and what does she represent for the future of the Democratic Party and potentially the most powerful country on Earth?
The most singular aspect of Harris’ newly elevated status is her identity as the daughter of immigrants who came to the U.S. in search of world-class education and were thrown together in the 1960s protest marches at Berkeley. Her father, Donald Harris, was an economist from Jamaica; her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, came from southern India and became a breast cancer researcher.
Part of the reason Harris’ rise has had such an emotional impact on large numbers of Americans lies in her quintessential story of a well-to-do first-generation citizen – some more so with the anti-immigrant Trump in the Oval Office.
After the seismic reckoning with systematic racism unleashed by Black Lives Matter, the collapse of this glass ceiling by a woman of color also left a deep impression on many.
“This does not discourage our past, but it does give us hope for the future,” said Catherine Flowers, a leading campaigner for environmental justice in Alabama, who acknowledged that she was shocked when Biden announced his running mate. “Black women have supported the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party for decades, yet we have rarely received credit.”
When Harris first appeared in Biden’s new role on Wednesday, she talks about how she’s blown up in politics from a young age when she was taken by her parents to the Berkeley anti-Vietnam protests. ” tight in my stroller “. After her parents divorced when she was seven, she was raised primarily by her mother, who taught her to “keep marching”.
Her mother made the sisters proud in her South Asian roots. In her political autobiography, The Truths We Hold, Harris describes how Shyamala also recognized that her daughters were perceived as black in the US and “was determined to ensure that we would grow into confident, proud black women”.
Harris attended the historic Black Howard University in Washington DC, where she gave her duty to the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and taught, she writes, that “we were young, gifted and black, and we would do nothing in ‘ the road must lead to our success ”.
Harris emphasizes in her memoirs those issues of identity. She also lends herself to what can be categorized as her softer side, devoting several pages to her husband, Doug Emhoff, a Los Angeles business lawyer she married in 2014, and his two children through a previous marriage, Cole and Ella .
She portrays herself as someone who provides family for all things, cooks regular Sunday dinners and plays sports mom to the kids who call her “Momala”. “I have held many titles in my career, and certainly ‘Vice President’ will be great, but ‘Momala’ will always be the one who means the most,” she said on Wednesday.
It may be obligatory for aspiring American politicians (with the exception of twice divorced Trump) to accentuate their family rights. For Harris, it serves the added purpose of rounding off the edges of her public image as a stingy and at times controversial accuser, as she also opposes sexist criticism focusing on her ambition and prudence.
Most recently, her ability to forensically dissect an opponent, learned on the job as a local prosecutor in Alameda and San Francisco and later as California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017, has been a major asset. It brought her among the nation’s nation when she reduced Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to a roaring wreck in 2017 and when she grilled Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court the following year. .
It was also on full display when they made it viral “that little girl was me” attack about Biden at the second Democratic debate last year, accused him of opposing the same desegregationist policies that had placed her on that bus to elementary school Thousand Oaks when she was a child.
While her overbearing opponent skills will no doubt be put to good use when she meets Mike Pence in the televised VP debate in October – they expect him to push his limb over his plate as head of the White House task force Home coronavirus – her career as a prosecutor continues to cause her difficulties with progressives. In her role as California’s ‘top cop’, she did not present herself as “tough on crime” or “soft on crime”, but “smart on crime”.
When she tried to justify her choice to forge her legal career on the procedural side, she talked about her commitment to seeking justice for all. “I knew the history of brave prosecutors who went to the Ku Klux Klan in the south, or who followed corrupt politicians and business polluters,” she said.
That did not spare her from coming under heavy criticism over some of her more controversial views while she was in positions of power. She did not use her statement to guarantee responsibility for police killings of Black people in the Bay Area, and held her back from intervening in various cases and resisting movements to require her office to investigate all fatal police shootings.
Questions have also been raised as to why she blocked the release of Daniel Larsen, a prisoner who had been acquitted by the courts, precisely because he missed a filing date for habeas corpus.
As state’s attorney general, they oppose legalizing marijuana for recreational use, even though it is a driver of mass arrest of young Black men in the U.S. Her sponsorship of a new law in California that threatens parents with jail time if they allow their children to play from school has also come under scrutiny as too much punishment.
All of which causes progressive women of color sense to have some conflict over their meteoric rise. Rachel Carmona, the chief operating officer of the Women’s March, who is Mexican American, welcomes Harris’ choice as historic and long overdue.
“But it’s not enough,” she said. “We reject the idea that we should represent women in prominent roles in our politics and our values. Both Harris and Biden must be ready on day one to push for a progressive agenda on justice and equality. ”
Pressure from the left to practice change is one thing, racist and sexist tropes from the right another.
Trump and his cohorts have not lost any time in Harris. The U.S. president, in an echo of his “birther” lie about Barack Obama’s nationality, encourages the false idea that Harris is not suitable for the second-highest bureau in the country because her parents were immigrants.
Other right-wing pundits have tried to find her Achilles heel with increasingly gruesome attacks on her personality. Fox News staffers deliberately mispronounced her name and mocked her as angry, crazy as “scurrilous”.
Harris says she takes her lead from her mother, who died in 2009, and who was often seen alive because of her strong Indian accent, but who refused to let that hold her back from being a leading wife of color to become in science.
One of her favorite expressions is, “Let no one tell you who you are – you tell them.”
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