Get to Know Kamala Harris
February 19, 2021
Kamala Harris made history on January 20, 2021, as the first African-American and South Asian woman to become vice president. She inspired many little girls around the world as she took the oath of office. Her role as vice president will be an example of strong American women for years to come. So, who is Kamala Harris?
Kamala Devi Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, the eldest of two daughters. Her mother was Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher from India, and her father was Donald Harris, a Jamaican economist and professor at Stanford University.
When she was seven years old, Kamala Harris’s parents divorced. Her mother took care of her and her sister, Maya, in a duplex in Berkeley. Meanwhile, Kamala attended Thousand Oaks Elementary School, which was in its second year of integration. She was bused to and from school for about three years. After her mother landed a teaching job at McGill University as well as a role as a cancer researcher at Jewish General Hospital, Harris moved to Montreal with her mother and sister.
Kamala Harris attended Howard University in Washington D.C., where she earned degrees in political science and economics. She also joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority at Howard. Harris then moved on to the prestigious Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. After graduating from Hastings in 1989 and passing the bar exam in 1990, Harris worked as an assistant district attorney in the Alameda County prosecutor’s office in Oakland. During this time, she built a name for herself as a strong and resilient prosecutor and was later recruited to the San Francisco District Attorney’s office. She then became the chief of the San Francisco City Attorney’s Division on Children and Families and was elected to the position of San Francisco District Attorney in 2004. She then became the first African-American woman to be elected district attorney in California. Conviction rates in San Francisco rose from 52% to 67% during the first three years of Harris’s term as district attorney.
In 2010, Harris ran for the position of California attorney general. Although the odds were against her, she was able to win by a slight margin of 0.8%. As the California attorney general, Harris was defiant in getting more than the $4 billion offer from the government in a national mortgage settlement during the foreclosure crisis. After refusing to sign the deal, Harris was able to obtain five times the amount, about $20 billion, in order to help homeowners in California. She also created “Open Justice,” a public online database for criminal justice which helped to boost police accountability. Additionally, Harris refused to defend Proposition 8, a law that banned same-sex marriage in the state. This action led to the law being overturned in 2013.
Kamala Harris gave a speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, which helped her gain a reputation on the national level. In 2014, Harris married Doug Emhoff, a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles. A year later, she announced her candidacy for the United States Senate. While campaigning, she focused on issues like immigration reform, raising the minimum wage, criminal justice reform, and protection for women’s reproductive rights. She won her 2016 election by a large margin.
After taking the oath of office in January of the following year, Kamala Harris became the first Indian-American and the second African-American woman to occupy a seat in the Senate. She served on the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Judiciary Committee. She earned a name for herself in the Senate for her style of interrogation used on witnesses during hearings, which likely drew from her days as an attorney and prosecutor. This irritated her Republican colleagues in the Senate, who criticized and sometimes interrupted her. This style of interrogation really stood out in her June 2017 questioning of Jeff Sessions, the United States Attorney General at the time. Sessions had been called to the Senate to testify in front of the Senate intelligence committee about Russian interference in the presidential election of 2016. “I’m not able to be rushed this fast! It makes me nervous,” Sessions remarked, after three and a half minutes of continuous questions from Harris. She also used this technique during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, when she questioned him about whether he had ever discussed the Mueller investigation with anyone.
Harris later announced her bid for the presidency in the 2020 election. She led in the polls for a while, and her popularity rose after she challenged Joe Biden on his stance on inter-district busing in public schools during the 1970s and 1980s. This is because she connected personally with the issue, as Harris herself was bused to and from school as a child. Her popularity later plummeted after campaign aides accused Harris of treating them poorly and giving her sister, Maya, too much control. She was forced to drop out of the race in December 2019.
She still managed to stay on the national stage, and endorsed Joe Biden in March. Harris became a leading figure in the fight for racial justice after the death of George Floyd, an African-American man who was killed while in police custody in May 2020.
In August 2020, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, chose Kamala Harris to be his vice president.
On November 7, 2020, four days after Election Day, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris triumphed. Although incumbent President Donald Trump argued against the election results for months after the election, Biden and Harris were still able to be inaugurated on January 20, 2021.
Kamala Harris made history that day, becoming the first African-American and South Asian woman to hold the office of vice president. During her acceptance speech, Harris said with a smile, “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last.”
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kamala-Harris
https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/H001075
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21554699/kamala-harris-victory-acceptance-speech