Kamala Harris

Steven Otfinoski

Description

This former attorney general has broken more than a few glass ceilings in her career. Kamala Harris, a daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants and raised by a single mother, brought her intelligence and drive to California's District Attorney and Attorney General's offices. In 2016, she campaigned for the U.S. Senate as a representative from California, and won. Her win made her the second Black woman to be elected to the Senate. However, she didn't stop there, becoming a contender for the Democratic nomination for president during the 2020 presidential campaign. Chosen by the winning Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, Harris became the first female, Black, South Asian, and person of color to become United States vice president.

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Dólar
• Senate
• Woman
• Government
• African American
• United States
• US
• Indian

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781646937721
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Kamala Harris
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Contents Chapters The Phone Call Mama s Girl A Voice for Justice Madame District Attorney Senator on the Rise Breaking Barriers Support Materials Timeline Bibliography Further Resources About the Author Learn More About The Electoral College Howard University District Attorney Doug Emhoff, Second Gentleman
Chapters
The Phone Call
It had been a long and grueling campaign. Now the campaign was over, but four days after the election, the winners were still undecided. Neither Republican President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence nor Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris had yet reached the required 270 electoral votes to be declared winners. 
The waiting for the final vote count was tense that Saturday morning, November 7, 2020, so Harris decided to release some of that tension by going for a jog. Wearing a Nike jacket and headphones, she went running, accompanied by several Secret Service agents for security. Suddenly news arrived that stopped her in her tracks. The Associated Press, CBS News and other media outlets announced that Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes had gone to Biden-Harris, putting them over the 270 electoral votes needed to win. 

Map of the electoral college, 2020 election
Harris immediately called Biden on her cellphone. "We did it," she cried. "We did it, Joe. You're going to be the next president of the United States." The eight-second video taken of the call went viral on Twitter; within four hours of its posting had 26 million views. 
Joe Biden's election to the presidency was certainly a remarkable achievement. Biden had run for president twice before, and served eight years as vice president under President Barack Obama. Now at age 78, he would become the oldest person to be elected president. But Harris's election as vice president was possibly more remarkable. She would become the first woman to serve in that office. She also became the first African American and the first Indian American to be elected vice president. As a team, Biden and Harris were the first candidates to garner more than 75 million votes in a presidential election, ever. 

People gather at Black Lives Matter Plaza near the White House to celebrate after Joe Biden is announced President-Elect; November 7, 2020.
Source: Shutterstock.
It had been a long and grueling campaign. But now the real work would begin. The president- and vice president-elect would face enormous challenges. These included a pandemic that had taken hundreds of thousands of American lives and was still raging, and a country deeply divided in a political and cultural war. But for Harris, these were challenges she had been preparing for her entire life.
Mama's Girl
She was born Kamala Devi Harris on October 20, 1964 in Oakland, California. Her first name means "lotus flower" in Sanskrit, an ancient language of India, the homeland of her mother, Shyamala Gopalan. "A lotus grows underwater, its flower rising above the surface while its roots are planted firmly in the river bottom," Harris explained in her 2019 autobiography. 
An Activist Family 
The roots of social justice and activism run deep in Harris. Her maternal grandfather, P.V. Gopalan, participated in the struggle for India's independence from Great Britain. After independence was achieved in 1947, Gopalan became a senior diplomat in the new Indian government. Harris's grandmother, Rajam, was a successful community organizer who spoke out for women's rights, long neglected in India. She campaigned against spousal abuse and supported women's reproductive rights and their access to birth control. 
Shyamala's parents encouraged her and her younger sisters to strive for success. She graduated from the University of Delhi at age 19 with high honors. With her parents' blessings she applied and was accepted into a doctorate program in nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California at Berkeley. She flew to America in 1958 to attend Berkeley, leaving homeland and family behind. There she met Jamaican immigrant Donald Harris, a doctoral student in economics. The two shared a commitment to social justice, marched in protests together, and eventually fell in love and married. Some of Harris's earliest childhood memories are of being wheeled around in a stroller by her mother at political rallies. 

Harris with her mother, Shyamala
Source: The White House.
Life with Mother
By this time, Shyamala had earned her Ph.D., and was a dedicated breast cancer researcher. But as devoted as father and mother were to their children, the marriage didn't last. When Harris was five and her sister Maya was three, their parents separated and her father left to teach economics at the University of Wisconsin. The two girls lived with their mother, who moved them to the top floor of a duplex in a Black working class neighborhood of Berkeley known as "the flatlands." "She had only two goals in life: to raise her two daughter and to end breast cancer," Harris has written. Shyamala regularly took Kamala and Maya to India to visit with their relatives and get in touch with their Indian culture. A lover of music, Shyamala had Kamala take piano lessons three times a week from an African-American neighbor. Kamala sang in the children's choir at the 23rd Avenue Church of God, which they regularly attended. Shyamala took the girls to see shows and concerts at a Black cultural center called the Rainbow Sign. An excellent cook, when one daughter had a bad day, mother would throw her an "unbirthday party" and bake her a cake.