Kamala Devi Harris Is America’s First Female Veep
In Sanskrit, her first name relates to the lotus, a flower that represents purity and divinity in Hinduism. Her second name, Devi, is the word for goddess, and while we don’t expect Kamala Devi Harris to work miracles, it is exciting to witness a woman of colour taking on one of the world’s top leadership roles.
President-elect Joe Biden and Harris sparred with each other during June’s Democratic debates – she lashed out at Biden for “finding common ground” with segregationist senators in the 1970s; he called her out for her record as a prosecutor in California. Yet in August she became Biden’s running partner and now the pair begin the enormous task of bringing America together after Donald Trump’s divisive term in office.
At Joe Biden’s victory event on Saturday in Wilmington, Delaware, Harris opened with a speech that honoured all American women – and particularly Black women – calling them “the backbone of our democracy”. She added that while she may be the first woman to become US vice-president, she will not be the last.
So, who is Kamala Devi Harris?
She was born in Oakland, California on October 20, 1964. She is 56 years old and stands at 157 cm, or 5 ft 2 in. Her parents are Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris; she has a younger sister, Maya Lakshmi Harris. Her parents met at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961 where both were students and active in civil rights. The couple separated in 1969, when Kamala was five, and divorced two years later. Kamala has written that Donald was her mother’s first boyfriend and that “the marriage may have survived had they been more mature”. In 1972 Professor Donald J. Harris, now 81, became the first Black scholar to receive tenure in Stanford’s Economics Department. Shymala died of colon cancer in 2009.
Harris went to high school in Montreal, Canada, where her mother moved the family to take up a teaching position. She attended Howard University, Washington DC, followed by law school in San Francisco. In 2018 she wrote a memoir, The Truths We Hold; she has also written Smart on Crime, a non-fiction book about criminal justice in 2009, and a 2019 children’s book titled Superheroes are Everywhere.
She was admitted to the California Bar in 1990 and hired as an assistant district attorney for California’s Alameda County. She worked in various legal capacities until 2004, when she successfully ran for the office of District Attorney in San Francisco. She held that position until 2011 when she became the first Black woman to serve as California’s attorney-general. In 2017 she was elected to the US Senate for the state of California, only the second Black woman in the chamber’s history.
In 2014 she married lawyer Douglas Emhoff and became stepmother to Cole, 26, and Ella, 21. Kamala told People magazine that, “My children don’t call me stepmom, they call me Momala.” Emhoff will become the first “second gentleman of the United States”.
Where does Kamala Harris stand on the big issues?
On abortion According to The Cut, Harris wants to codify Roe v Wade, the 1973 US Supreme Court ruling that makes it illegal for US states to restrict abortion to women. That legislation has been eroded over time, with some US state legislatures passing laws to undermine it. Codifying Roe v Wade would make women’s right to access abortion a federal law, taking it out of the hands of the Supreme Court. Harris has spoken out against recent Supreme Court appointee Amy Coney Barrett, who has the backing of various anti-abortion groups.
On healthcare In the past, Biden and Harris have clashed over healthcare, according to Marie Claire. Harris is in favour of a hybrid model that includes private coverage, while Biden wants to build on the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare.
On climate change Harris has described climate change as “an existential threat that demands bold action.” She supports the New Green Deal, a package of legislation that addresses climate change, and the Paris Climate Agreement which President Donald Trump pulled out of in June, 2017.
On gun control Harris, who owns her own handgun, has called for reform of America’s gun laws. She supports a ban on assault weapons, mandatory background checks and closing loopholes. She has said that gun ownership and a reduction of gun death are not mutually exclusive.
On education Harris has proposed an out-of-school-hours care program called The Family Friendly Schools Act aimed at working parents who can’t afford to pay for after-school care. According to the BBC, fewer than half of all US elementary schools provide after-school care. She has also proposed giving teachers pay rises.
On systemic racism Following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis in May this year, Harris marched in Black Lives Matter protests and has written about the need to dismantle systemic racism in the United States in Cosmopolitan.
On her role as a prosecutor Harris has faced criticism for her tough-on-crime stance while she was California’s attorney-general, including a robust op-ed in The New York Times in January 2019. She has repeatedly said her aim is to change the system from the inside. In another New York Times piece Black lawyer and writer Reginald Dwayne Betts, an ex-felon himself, addressed the complexities of the criminal justice system as experienced by African-American communities. “When Harris decided to run for president,” Betts wrote, “I thought the country might take the opportunity to grapple with the injustice of mass incarceration in a way that didn’t lose sight of what violence, and the sorrow it creates, does to families and communities. Instead, many progressives tried to turn the basic fact of Harris’s profession into an indictment against her. Shorthand for her career became: ‘She’s a cop,’ meaning, her allegiance was with a system that conspires, through prison and policing, to harm Black people in America.”
Words Patricia Sheahan
Photo_ Sourced from Politico