“I’m crying,” said Amelia Ashley-Ward, a friend and publisher of The Sun-Reporter, a publication aimed at the African-American community in San Francisco. “When I first met Kamala Harris, I always felt like God had something a little extra for her.”
Those who know her say she may find it difficult to torment in part because, from her identity, she is not like any political figure who came before – a legislator whose strengths and tics can sometimes be involuntary. to feel.
As a young district attorney candidate, Mrs. Harris was by a turn an unremarkable fixture in supermarket parking lots, and fired an ironing board from her car as a cloth for campaign materials, and a fiery veteran of the pages of the San Francisco society, with a to full fabric Filofax filled with high-end contacts for fund-raising. (Friends eventually switched to a Palm Pilot.)
She can dispel an air of nonchalance projection, continuing with 1990s cooking and hip-hop music with a just-between-us touch. She has often also maintained a standard of political reticence so firmly that her own staff had difficulty identifying their positions on several key issues in a full 2020 campaign that did not make it to 2020.
Tired of the pressure to explain her personal experiences of racism as historic at first, she broke down in private with some of the treatment she received from the news media, donors and political strategists. Ms. Harris is known for sharing, with equal parts fatigue and confusion, an anecdote about an unidentified journalist who asked why she would ever choose Howard University, the crown jewel of historic Black colleges and universities, over the Ivy League.
“I’m really sick of having to explain my experiences of racism to people,” she said in a June interview, “to make her understand that it exists.”
For Ms. Harris, the firstborn daughter of immigrant academics from India and Jamaica, political activism was a form of birthright. Her grandparents fought for Indian independence from British rule and educated rural women over control. Her parents protested for civil and voting rights as doctoral students at the University of California, Berkeley.
