Kamala Harris will be the first woman, African American and South Asian American as Vice President

From: Petter J Larsson

Published: 08 November 2020 kl. 12.56
Updated: 08 November 2020 kl. 13.21

She will be the first female, African American and South Asian American as Vice President.

Then Kamala Harris, 56, pays tribute to her Indian mother Shyamala, who died of cancer in 2009.

– She so sincerely believed in America where moments like this are possible, says Harris.

On Saturday, 56-year-old Kamala Harris became the first female vice president of the United States. The California-born politician, lawyer, and author will also be the country’s first African-American and South American in office.

She went for a walk with her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, 56, when Joe Biden’s victory came.

“We did it, we did it, Joe,” Harris happily said in a video posted on Twitter shortly after Democrats won in the crucial state of Pennsylvania.

He was standing in the field in casual clothes and sunglasses and the phone in hand, probably with his campaign partner Biden on the other end of the phone.

“You will be the next president of the United States,” Harris said with his trademark laugh.

A few hours later, she took the stage dressed in a white suit and praised the women, especially the black ones, who paved the way for her historic victory.

– Tonight I think about her struggle, her determination and the strength of her vision to see what can be alleviated from what has been, said Harris, who stepped to the tune of Mary J. Blige.

– Women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality, freedom, and justice for all, including black women who are often overlooked but often proven to be the backbone of our democracy.

Greeted his mother

For more than 200 years, America’s political elite has been made up primarily of white men. Harris said it was a test of Biden’s character that “he had the audacity to break down one of the broadest barriers in our country and elect a woman as his vice president.”

“Every girl who looks at tonight sees that this is a land of possibilities,” she said.

– I may be the first woman in the White House, but I won’t be the last.

Most of all, Harris paid tribute to his mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who moved to the United States from India when she was 19 years old.

“He may not have been able to fully imagine this moment,” Harris said.

– But she believed so sincerely in America where moments like this are possible. Then I think of her and of generations of women – black, Asian, white, Hispanic and indigenous women – who, throughout our country’s history, have paved the way for this moment tonight.

Shyamala Gopalan, who died of cancer in 2009, was a biomedical researcher from Chennai, India, who received some of her parents’ retirement savings to pursue a master’s degree at the University of California. She then remained in the United States, where she married Donald J. Harris, a Stanford University economics professor who emigrated from Jamaica. The marriage lasted eight years and they had two daughters, Kamala and Maya. Attorney Maya Harris, 53, served as a policy advisor on Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 and this year was the leader of her older sister’s campaign.

He wanted to protect himself against Trump

The parents divorced when Kamala was seven years old. When she was 12, she and Maya moved with her mother to Montreal, Canada, where she attended French school. In 1981, Kamala returned to the United States, where she graduated from the University of California with a law degree eight years later. And Kamala kept climbing, from prosecutors for more serious crimes in Alameda County to prosecutors and district attorneys in San Francisco. In 2011, she was elected the first African-American woman to be California’s attorney general and chief attorney, a position she held until she was voted in the United States Senate in the 2016 election. She promised to protect immigrants from the policies of the time. newly elected President Donald Trump.

“There are many people who, after this election result, are dissatisfied to say the least,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

– What we want to say is that you are not alone, you want to say something and we must support you.

In Washington, Harris became known for using his experience as a prosecutor to host entertaining grills of top names on Donald Trump’s staff. Perhaps the most famous was the hearing of Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who later admitted that his style made him nervous.

Candidate against Biden

In January last year, Harris announced that she would be running for president and was cheered by 20,000 people at a campaign event in her hometown of Oakland. But she was deemed difficult to run as a Democratic candidate and she abandoned her campaign after less than a year.

“His presidential campaign clearly struggled to find his own voice and it was a challenge to find a position among 20 fellow Democrats (who also campaigned),” said Mark Leno, a former California senator who has known Harris for 25 years. Financial times.

Instead, Biden chose her as his vice presidential candidate, and there she succeeded. Not least for your ability to obtain financial support. In the first 48 hours after Biden announced that he had chosen Harris, he received $ 48 million, approximately SEK 415 million, in donations for his campaign.

During the campaign, Harris has told more about herself, her past as an immigrant daughter, her love of cooking and Converse shoes, and her role as a stepmother to Doug Emhoff’s children in their 20s from a previous marriage. Since her marriage to Emhoff, Harris has become “Mammala” to her son Cole and daughter Ella because all three have agreed that they did not like the term “stepmother.”

Nervous encounter with stepchildren

As the daughter of divorce, Harris hadn’t wanted to be involved in the children’s lives until she probably knew that what she and Doug had was long-term. But soon the first nervous encounter came.

“On the way to meet Doug, I grabbed a cookie jar and tied a ribbon on a bow. I was excited and nervous. I repeated what I was going to say. Would the children think he was too cute or too weird with cookies? Was the rosette too much? (The rosette was probably too much, but Cole and Ella have been nice and have said nothing over the years), “Harris wrote in a column on Elle last year.

Cole and Ella couldn’t have been more welcoming. They are bright, talented, and fun children who have grown into exceptional adults. Doug had already caught me, but I think it was Cole and Ella who stopped me. “

In the chronicle, Harris recounted how she became good friends with the children’s mother, Kerstin, and how she missed them when she moved to Washington. When FBI Director James Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee about how he was fired and about the Russia investigation, it was the same day Ella graduated from high school.

“It was a jet lag that I was painfully aware of, but it wasn’t the Senate Intelligence Committee or the rest of the country,” wrote Harris, who rushed home to catch up on the evening family dinner.

He became a politician in Washington

This is not the first time Harris has lived in Washington. When he returned to the United States from Canada at age 17 to begin his studies, he began his studies at Howard University in the capital, graduating in 1986 with a degree in political science and economics. Howard’s time, which is historically a black university, shaped his political stance.

“You didn’t have to limit yourself to someone else’s idea of ​​what it means to be black,” he told CNN in September.

– You could read pictures and shapes and be the president of the class. Can be selected for Homecomingqueen and lead the science club. You can be part of a student nation and be a member of the student government and want to train as a lawyer, and that encouraged you to be the best you can be.

On people who tried to put her in a union or doubted her political ability, Harris said:

– I didn’t listen. And the people didn’t listen either. And we won.

Sources: CNN, Elle, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Oprah Magazine.

Published: 08 November 2020 kl. 12.56

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