Kamala Harris made history on Saturday as the first black woman elected as the vice president of the United States, breaking down barriers that have kept men, nearly all white, entrenched at the highest levels of American politics for more than two centuries.
The 56-year-old senator from California, also the first person of South Asian descent elected to the vice presidency, represents the multiculturalism that defines America, but is largely absent from Washington’s centers of power. His black identity has allowed him to speak in personal terms in a year of reckoning about police brutality and systemic racism. As the highest-ranking woman ever elected in the US government, her victory gives hope to the women who were devastated by the defeat of Hillary Clinton four years ago.
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Harris has been a rising star in Democratic politics for much of the past two decades, serving as a San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general before becoming a United States senator. After Harris ended his own 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, Joe Biden chose her as his running mate. They will be sworn in as president and vice president on January 20.
Biden’s choice of running mate had added significance because he will be the oldest president ever to take office, at 78, and he has not committed to seeking a second term in 2024.
Harris often framed her candidacy as part of the often underrated legacy of pioneering black women who preceded her, including educator Mary McLeod Bethune, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, and Representative Shirley Chisholm, the first black female candidate to seek an important match. presidential nomination, in 1972.
“They often don’t teach us their stories,” Harris said in August when he accepted his party’s vice presidential nomination. “But as Americans, we all stand on his shoulders.”
That story was on Sara Twyman’s mind recently as she watched Harris’s Las Vegas campaign and wore a sweatshirt with the senator’s name alongside Chisholm.
“It is time for a woman to rise to the highest levels of our government,” said Twyman, who is 35 and black.
Despite the excitement surrounding Harris, she and Biden face great challenges, including deepening racial tensions in the United States in the wake of a pandemic that has taken a disproportionate toll on people of color and a series of police killings. of African Americans. Harris’s previous work as a prosecutor has sparked skepticism among progressive and young voters who expect her to endorse radical institutional change over gradual reforms in police, drug policy and more.
Jessica Byrd, who leads the Black Lives Movement Election Justice Project and The Frontline, a multiracial coalition effort to push voters forward, said she plans to participate in the rigorous organizing work necessary to propel Harris and Biden into policy. more progressive.
“I deeply believe in the power of black women’s leadership, even when all of our policies don’t align,” Byrd said. “I want us to be committed to the idea that the performance is exciting and worthy of celebration and also that we have millions of black women who deserve a fair chance.”
Harris is the second black woman elected to the Senate. His colleague, Senator Cory Booker, who is also black, said his mere presence makes the institution “more accessible to more people” and suggested he would achieve the same with the vice presidency.
Harris was born in 1964 to two parents active in the civil rights movement. Shyamala Gopalan, from India, and Donald Harris, from Jamaica, met at the University of California, Berkeley, then a hotbed of 1960s activism. They divorced when Harris and his sister were children, and Harris was raised by her late mother, whom she considers the most important influence in her life.
Kamala means “lotus flower” in Sanskrit, and Harris nodded to her Indian heritage throughout the campaign, including calling out her “chitthis,” a Tamil word for a maternal aunt, in her first speech as a companion of Biden’s formula. When Georgia Senator David Perdue mocked her name at a rally in October, the hashtag #MyNameIs took off on Twitter, with South Asians sharing the meaning of their names.
The mockery of his name by Republicans, including Trump, was just one of the attacks Harris faced. Trump and his allies sought to brand her a radical and a socialist despite her more centrist record, an effort intended to make people uncomfortable with the prospect of a black woman in leadership. She was the target of online disinformation laced with racism and sexism about her qualifications to serve as president.
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington said Harris’s power comes not just from her life experience, but also from the people she already represents. California is the most populous and most diverse state in the nation; almost 40% of the people are Latino and 15% are Asian. In Congress, Harris and Jayapal have teamed up on bills to ensure legal representation for Muslims targeted by Trump’s 2017 travel ban and to extend rights to domestic workers.
“That’s the kind of politics that also happens when there are voices like ours at the table,” said Jayapal, who in 2016 was the first South Asian woman elected to the US House of Representatives. Harris won the Senate election that same year.
Harris’s mother raised her daughters with the understanding that the world would view them as black women, Harris said, and that’s how she describes herself today.
She attended Howard University, one of the nation’s historically black universities, and became engaged to Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s first sorority created by and for black women. He campaigned regularly in the HBCUs and tried to address the concerns of young black men and women eager to go to great lengths to dismantle systemic racism.
His victory could bring more black women and people of color into politics.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who considers Harris a mentor, views Harris’s success through the lens of his own identity as the granddaughter of a sharecropper.
“African Americans are not too far from slavery and the horrors of racism in this country, and we are still feeling the impacts of that with the way they treat us and what is happening around this racial uprising,” he said. Harris’s candidacy “instills a lot of pride and a lot of hope and a lot of excitement in what is possible.”
Harris is married to a Jewish man, Doug Emhoff, whose children from a previous marriage call her “Momala.” Enthusiasm for her candidacy extends to women of all races.
Friends Sarah Lane and Kelli Hodge, each with three daughters, brought the six girls to a Harris rally in Phoenix in the final days of the race. “This car is full of girls who dream big. Come on Kamala! read a poster taped to the trunk of the car.
Lane, a 41-year-old attorney of Hispanic and Asian descent, volunteered for Biden and Harris, her first time working for a political campaign. When asked why she brought her daughters, ages 6, 9 and 11, to see Harris, she replied, “I want my daughters to see what women can do.”
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