Kamala Harris, who was promoted to vice president, became the first woman and person of color in American history to shoulder this important task. A divided election once again exposed the destructive effects of racial injustice in the United States, and her election was a milestone for the United States in a drastic change, which means that people are struggling with racial injustice. Although the Americans ticked a 78-year-old white male on the ballot, the 56-year-old Harris still represents the future of this increasingly racially diverse country.
Harris was taught from an early age that there is still a long way to go to achieve racial justice. During the campaign, she mentioned many times the political elders who had participated in the election, the immigrants who devoted themselves to the American civil rights movement, and the ancestors of African descent who pave the way for racial justice. Generations of struggling women of various ethnicities. “Although I may be the first woman to serve as vice president, I am definitely not the last,” she told a cheering audience in Wilmington, Delaware, “because everyone who watches the speech tonight Little girls can discover that this is a country full of possibilities.”
| High-profile |
Harris’ status in the national leadership is higher than any female in the past, which highlights the excellence of her political career. She was the San Francisco District Attorney General and was elected as the California Attorney General in 2010. She was the first female and African-American attorney general in the area. In 2016, she was elected as a senator and became the second African-American woman in the history of the Senate. She immediately made a name for herself in Washington with her vigorous and vigorous prosecution style at the Senate hearing.
1. In 1965, Harris and his father 2. Harris (right) participated in anti-apartheid protests in his freshman year. 3. In 1986, Harris graduated from Howard University.
4. In 2004, Harris was sworn in as the San Francisco District Attorney with his mother.
Harris’s life experience also made her eye-catching: her father was Jamaican and her mother was Indian; in her early years in Oakland and Berkeley, California, she had already embarked on the road of pursuing racial justice, and later wrote in her memoirs. I had nostalgia for the protests that year. Harris recounted that when he was young, he frequently visited the Berkeley African American Cultural Center, and was fortunate to hear the speech of the first African American woman who ran for US president in 1971. After living in Montreal, Canada for a few years, Harris enrolled in Howard University, a historic African-American university and one of the most prestigious universities in the United States. After graduation, she joined the legal profession as a prosecutor and took over cases of domestic violence and child exploitation.
Harris often talks in a relaxed tone about the deceased mother of a breast cancer medical scientist and her Jewish white husband Douglas Enhoff. Like his wife, Enhof also made history, becoming the first “second gentleman” in the history of the United States. Harris was also talking about her pair of stepchildren, who called her “Mama Mara.”
During the Democratic primaries, Harris had mixed success and failure. Taking tribute to Chisholm as a starting point, she attracted more than 20,000 voters in Auckland and established her leading position in the early elections. However, this time the Democratic Party’s primaries are vast. When competing for the nomination with the most diverse candidate in history, she failed to gain a lot of support and withdrew from the race in the first few weeks of the primary vote.
After announcing his candidacy for president in 2019, Harris applauded his supporters before the Democratic Party event in Nevada.
Harris hopes to win the support of progressives in the party, but her conservative stance as California’s attorney general has been questioned by progressives. She worked hard to build her own policy agenda, but was vague on medical and health issues. Her fierce attack on Biden’s black history of racial discrimination may be the most serious attack that the latter faced during the entire primary election.
After Biden announced Harris as his running partner, the two made their debut together.
| Break the barriers |
In an interview with The New York Times in July 2019, Harris said, “Policy must fit reality. This is my principle. If you talk about ideas and deviate from reality, they are just castles in the sky.” It is precisely ideological. Flexibility and inclusiveness make Harris very suitable for the post of vice president. This position requires obedience and respect to the president and reconciliation of personal views. Although part of Harris’s position is different from that in the primary election, she also tried her best to express her support for Biden’s position. During the party’s primary elections, she worked hard to attract women and African-American voters who she hoped would resonate. After becoming Biden’s running partner, she assisted Biden and continued to contact people of color. Some of these voters revealed that for the first time they felt that they had their own representation in national politics.
Many people have heard of the continuing racist and sexist attacks by conservatives, and are therefore awed by it. Trump refused to read Kamala’s name correctly and ridiculed her as a “monster” after the vice presidential candidate debate. Some of Harris’s supporters empathized with the cynicism she had to endure. “As the only African-American at the conference table, I know that feeling.” said Clara Faulkner, acting chief of Forest Hill, Texas.
Some establishments expressed indignation at such insults, but Harris’ friends knew well that in the face of the colored eyes of politics, she had learned to deal with it calmly. Senator Corey Booker has known Harris for decades and is her friend and colleague. He said that in a world where African-American women are not always welcome to break through barriers, Harris’s calmness in the face of various attacks To a certain extent, Zi Ruo is a kind of self-protection. “She is calm and unhurried, as if these things will not have any effect on her mood.” Booker said, “She has endured this kind of pain throughout her career, but she will not take it to heart.”
In November 2020, Harris delivered a victory speech in Delaware.
The Democrats cheered for the results of the 2020 general election. This victory lit the light and swept away the haze of the defeat of many Democratic candidates. California Democrat Rep. Barbara Lee said she firmly believes that one day she will see an African-American woman enter the highest level of power in the United States. “What you see now is a remarkable and talented woman of African and Indian descent. She is ready to realize the ideals and ambitions of Shirley Chisholm and other women of color.” She said, “At this moment, we have been waiting for a long time, and it is hard to come by.” However, the first case in the history of the White House is still only to place women in the second in command. Harris is already close to the Oval Office of the White House, of course, she is not there yet.
| The future can be expected |
During Trump’s tenure, women set off a wave of opposition against him. Many women participated in political activities for the first time, but Hillary Clinton’s “highest and hardest glass ceiling” was still intact. Democratic voters, including a large number of women, gathered behind Biden and avoided women and people of color in the primary election because they firmly believed that Biden was the most likely candidate to defeat Trump. Clinton’s defeat in 2016 left many people feeling unsure. They then believed that the country was not ready to elect a woman to be in charge of the army.
Biden has stated that he would choose a woman as his running mate and admitted that the Democratic Party may not necessarily be led by him in the future. Today, Harris is under scrutiny more closely than any recent vice president. Such attention is inevitable for the first-in-line successor to the oldest president in American history. She also knows her own role in making history, and regards the ideals of the ancestors of the civil rights movement and fighting for the rights and interests of the next generation of women and people of color as her mission.
Bailey Kansu, an outstanding scholar of critical racial theory, was also immersed in great joy, but she emphasized that this historic moment should not distract the progressives from continuing to advance their political agenda. “This is still the Biden administration, and what Harris thinks and does must be regarded as part of that administration,” she said, “so we can’t slow down by celebrating this breakthrough moment.”
For others, this is the long-awaited moment, such as the 94-year-old Opal Lee. When she voted for the first time, she used the money to buy food rations for her four children to pay the poll tax, qualified to vote and cast a vote for the Democratic candidate. Decades later, the retired teacher from Fort Worth, Texas, cheered and celebrated at the Obama inauguration. Although the new crown virus poses health risks, in order to see Harris with his own eyes, Opal had no intention of missing Biden’s January inauguration in Washington. “I want to be able to tell my great-great-grandchildren what it’s like to witness a woman becoming a vice president.” She said, “I have to leave now.”
