• From Inquirer

  November 6, 2020

• November 6, 2020

  8 minute read

With those simple words, Kamala Harris this morning acknowledged that she, as the running mate for Joe Biden, had made history.

She is the first female vice-president of the United States, a marvellous and momentous achievement for women, for black women, and for history, on the centenary of female suffrage.

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What do we know about her?

Well, there is a village outside Chennai where children play cricket, and weathered fishermen prowl the beach.

Harris’s mother was born near here, and she still has family in town.

When a Financial Times reporter visited a year or so ago, he found one of her great aunts cracking coconuts in a ritual designed to “remove all obstacles” from Harris’s path to the White House. She was then running for president.

That campaign ran out of puff, but is today America’s first ­female vice-president. It’s only taken 100 years. And because of the all the fuss about who would be president, the development went not unnoticed, but certainly under-reported.

The 19th amendment, women’s franchise in the US, was ratified on August 18, 1920. So this is a momentous and marvellous moment, and for Harris it has been a meteoric political rise.

She is a first-term junior senator from California who is now, as the saying goes, just a heartbeat from the Oval Office, and look, we’re hardly the first to bring up Joe Biden’s age. He’ll be 78 years old when he’s sworn in. Speaking actuarially, it is hardly beyond imagining that the first female president of the United States could be Kamala Harris.

What do we know about her?

She was born in the port city of Oakland — named, in the 1800s, for the California redwoods that once grew in forests there — on October 20, 1964, which makes her 56 years old.

She has two immigrant parents: an Indian-born mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who moved to the US as a young woman to study biomedical science in 1960; and a Jamaican-born father, Donald Harris, a Stanford University economics professor, now emeritus. They are divorced, and Harris has said that she was raised by her late mother, who was Hindu.

Harris has visited India several times, donating small amounts to social infrastructure projects, including a temple. The Indian community in the US is about 2.8 million strong, and growing fast. It historically votes Democrat. That is particularly true of those who live in California, where Harris lives.

It was the Democrat Barack Obama who cleared the way for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit the US, after visa ­restrictions were put in place by a Republican president George W. Bush in response to the 2002 riots in Gujarat.

Then came the blossoming of the Modi-Trump bromance. Modi is a Hindu-nationalist, pursing Hindu-national goals to the point of messing with modern India’s secular bones. Trump feels a natural kinship, and was happy to host a “Howdy Modi” event in Texas during his first term, attracting 50,000 flag-­waving supporters.

This was followed by an even larger “Namaste Trump” event for the US President in India, where Trump mangled the pronunciation of Sachin Tendulkar before a cheering crowd of 100,000 at the world’s biggest cricket stadium in Ahmedabad.

A video featuring Trump and Modi walking hand-in-hand through the White House rose garden attracted millions of views on messaging apps popular in India. Some of the same footage was used during ads for Trump in the 2020 campaign.

Analysis led by Sumitra Badrinathan, an advanced PhD student in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace suggests that Indian-born Americans tend not to vote with India-US ties in mind.

Healthcare, the economy, and attitudes to immigration are seen as more important. In any case, the vast majority of Indian-born Americans live in states where the outcome — Democrat — was already secure. California is, of course, one such state.

It will be interesting to see how Harris handles India, which is surely a better fit for trade and ­relations for the US than China. She has not made foreign affairs a priority during her first term in the Senate. She doesn’t serve on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, for example.

She has, however, made some pointed remarks on Kashmir. Modi’s government last year revoked Article 370, which gave Kashmir a degree of autonomy relative to other Indian states, such as the ability to select a flag.

When Harris was asked about it during a campaign event for her own presidential bid, she said: “We are all watching.” This was taken as an implied criticism of human rights abuses under Modi’s watch.

All that said, it is important to remember that for all her Indian-born mother’s example and influence, Harris identifies as black. Her father is a Jamaican-American, and she has previously said that her mother immersed both of her daughters — Kamala has a younger sister Maya, who is a former policy analyst for Hillary Clinton and a political commentator for MSNBC — in Oakland’s black community. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” Harris wrote in her autobiography The Truths We Hold.

“She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls and she was determined to make sure that we would grow into confident, proud black women.”

Harris embraced the culture. She spent four years at Howard University, one of America’s proudest, and most distinguished, black colleges. She earned her law degree at the University of California.

She became the district attorney for San Francisco in 2003, and in 2014, she married a fellow lawyer, Douglas Emhoff, who is white, and apparently on the cusp of becoming the first vice-presidential gentleman (and the first Jewish spouse of a US vice-president.) She is stepmother to his two children, and a member of the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco.

Harris has since known many of her own firsts: the first woman, and the first black person, to serve as California’s attorney-general; the first black-Asian-American woman to run for US vice-president on a major party ticket.

She carries the achievements lightly. In a recent interview, Harris said her mother told her: “You may be the first to do many things. Make sure you are not the last.”

As a woman running for the office of vice-president, she stands on the shoulders of some punchy giants: after all, women in the US started running before they could even vote.

Many were black, or First ­Nations people, making a point about proper representation.

Charlotta Bass, for example, became the first black woman candidate for vice-president in 1952. She was a newspaper publisher who owned the California Eagle. LaDonna Harris, a member of the Comanche nation from Oklahoma, ran for vice-president in 1980; Angela Davis, a black activist and philosophy professor in California, who had been on the FBI’s most wanted list, ran on the Communist Party ticket in 1980 and 1984; Emma Wong Mar, who ran in 1984, was the daughter of Chinese immigrants; Winona LaDuke was an economist and Native American activist in Minnesota, who joined Ralph Nader on the Green Party ticket in 1996.

Harris wasn’t particularly well known outside California before 2018. But she sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and she was able to make a bit of a splash during the Senate hearings into Donald Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, when her sharp questions became an “epic take-down!” on Twitter.

Trump fired back, saying: “She was nasty to a level that was just a horrible thing.”

From there, she launched her own presidential campaign.

Serious damage to her woke credentials was done by University of San Francisco law professor Lara Bazelon, who wrote a scathing piece for The New York Times, describing Harris as something close to evil.

“She fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct,” Bazelon wrote. “That included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.”

Bazelon outlined, among others, the case of George Gage, an electrician with no criminal record, serving a 70-year sentence for a crime of which he may well be innocent.

“George Gage … was charged in 1999 with sexually abusing his stepdaughter … The case largely hinged on the stepdaughter’s testimony and Mr Gage was convicted,” the piece said.

“Afterwards, the judge discovered that the prosecutor had unlawfully held back potentially exculpatory evidence … Ms Harris’s prosecutors defended the conviction.

“They pointed out that Mr Gage, while forced to act as his own lawyer, had not properly raised the legal issue in the lower court, as the law required. Mr. Gage is still in prison serving a 70-year sentence.”

There were other examples in the piece, of other prisoners, many of them black, who may well be innocent, whose causes received no support from Harris.

“Kamala is a cop” got some traction, but died when Harris’s campaign for the presidency ended.

She joined Biden’s ticket in August, and conducted a cool, uncontroversial debate against Mike Pence during this year’s campaign.

Her determination to be heard — “Mr Vice-President, I’m speaking” — played well. She showed none of Trump’s impatience, and displayed no petulance, while waiting for the count.

“Americans should have faith in the voting process and have the constitutional right to have their lawfully cast ballots counted,” she tweeted. “That simple proposition is a cornerstone of American democracy. It’s not up to us or Donald Trump to declare the winner of this election. The voters will decide.”

And this morning? She posted this happy video on Twitter. Simple words. We did it. We did it, Joe.

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Source: news.google.com