President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Republican Senator David Perdue are among the top Republicans who have mispronounced the name of now Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Senator Perdue at a rally while referring to Harris said, “KAH’-mah-lah? Kah-MAH’-lah? Kamala-bad-bad? I do not know. Whatever. ”The audience laughed.
But Kamala Devi Harris made history Saturday by becoming the first person of South Asian descent and the first woman of color to become a vice president-elect of the United States.
Shyamala Gopalan, Kamala’s mother, was born in Chennai (Madras) and came to Berkeley in 1959, at the age of 19, after graduating from Lady Irwin College for Women in Delhi. Donald Harris, Kamala’s father, came to Berkeley to study economics from the newly independent Jamaica in 1963. They met in protest marches against injustice and racial inequality, fell in love and married in 1963. On his website, the Senator Harris has affirmed her dual roots: South Asian and African American. In her virtual acceptance speech Aug. 19 as the Democratic Party vice presidential candidate, Harris recognized African American women who fought for equality: “Mary Church Terrell, Mary McCleod Bethune, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dane Nash, Constance Baker Motley and Shirly Chisholm. “She added:” There is another woman, whose name is not known, whose story is not shared … my mother – Shyamala Gopalan Harris. “
Shyamala built a career as a renowned breast cancer researcher, while Donald became a professor of economics at Stanford University. Kamala was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, and raised in a predominantly African-American neighborhood of Berkeley. Harris attended Westmount High School in Quebec and attended Howard University in Washington, DC and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where she obtained her Juris Doctorate in 1989. After being admitted to the State Bar of California In 1990, Harris began his career. career as an Assistant District Attorney in Alameda County. She became a managing attorney for the Criminal Career Unit at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office in 1998 and in 2000 she was appointed head of its Community and Neighborhood Division, during which time she established the state’s first Office of Child Justice. . Harris started as the state attorney general in 2010.
Read more: ‘Grateful to the woman most responsible for my presence’: Vice President-elect Kamala Harris remembers her mother in her first speech after the victory
Harris continued her political rise by narrowly beating Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley as California Attorney General in November 2010, making her the first African-American and the first woman to hold the position. After the November 2016 elections, Harris became the second African American woman and the first South Asian American to win a seat in the United States Senate. He even ran in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, but dropped out of the race before the end of the year. In August 2020, Joe Biden announced Harris as a running mate for vice president.
During his political rally in North Carolina, President Donald Trump pointed to Kamala Harris and said, “She could never be the first female vice president. . . That would be an insult to our country ”.
Now, Kamala Harris is the elected vice president of the United States of America.
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