Not only is Harris also a Black woman. Or that she’s also a lawyer.
Walker-Huntington is one of the legions of Jamaican immigrants in Florida, for whom the senator’s multi-hypnotic background in California is a source of pride. If elected, Harris – the daughter of two immigrants – would become the nation’s first Black vice president, the first female vice president, the first Indian-American and the first Jamaican-American to stand for office.
Harris’ Jamaican-born father, Donald Harris, is an economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University; her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a breast cancer researcher born in India.
Harris “imagines what America is today,” said Walker-Huntington, who emigrated from the island four decades ago and practiced immigration law in Miramar, Florida. “She’s a first-generation American, and only in America, in one generation, could you reach where she is.”
We carry the archipelago within us, searching and listening, always, for pieces of what we left behind. A pearl on one that makes a good guava cake. Discover the source of a Trinidadian lilt on a volume elevator. And then there’s the habit – an occupation, really – of tracing the Caribbean heritage in the people around us.
The celebrity and the political appeal run by: Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Susan Rice. Cicely Tyson, ek.
Harris, who ran for the Democratic nomination last year, has navigated public life as a Black woman in America.
That is not to say that she does not all embrace who she is. Harris soon grows impatient with those who demand that they claim one piece of their inheritance over another.
Harris’ parents divorced when she was a small child. And she grew up in the Bay Area multicultural mix, where she and her sister, Maya, were largely raised by their mother. (Gopalan Harris, the daughter of an Indian diplomat, graduated from the University of Delhi at 19 and earned her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley at 25).
But Harris, in her autobiography “The Truths We Hold,” said her mother, “understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters. She knew her adopted homeland Maya and I would look like Black girls, and she was determined to get there. to make sure we grow into self-confident, proud Black women. “
Who knows what will happen in the coming months. But for the islanders who keep scoring – always reconstructing that continent of islands, if only it is in our minds – Harris will remain the first daughter of the West Indies on a presidential card for big parties.
Back in Miramar, once Walker-Huntington was done writing, she got to work – calling, texting and emailing about the Caribbean people she knew on the mainland.
“Oh, we’re already raising money,” she said.
.
