Cameryn Dixon
November 7, 2020, -Kamala Harris became the first African American and South Asian Woman elected to the office Vice President of the United States of America. Ms. Kamala Harris will be the new face of political power after a long time of having predominantly male in the highest office of Vice President.
She was elected Vice President after a lifetime of public service, having been elected District Attorney of San Francisco, California Attorney General, and United States Senator.
Vice President Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California to an immigrant family from India and Jamaica. She attended Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of Law according to the White House. Her time at Howard, where she joined Alpha Kappa Alpha Sprortiy inc., profoundly shaped her political vision. “You didn’t have to be confined by anyone else’s idea of what it means to be Black,” she told CNN Dana Bash on “State of the Union” in September of last year.
Kamala Harris comes from a loving family of three. She has a younger sister named Maya, who has become a public policy advocate. Her father was an educator, who taught at Stanford University, and her mother was a cancer researcher. One important impetus in Kamala’s life was the quote, ” My mother would look at me and she’d say, ‘Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you are not the last.’”
Harris worked as a Deputy District Attorney (1990-98) in Oakland, where she earned a reputation for being a tough prosecutor according to Gregory McNamee, a writer for the Britannica website.
She prosecuted cases of gang violence, drug trafficking, and sexual abuse. With a reputation like Kamala Harris’, she easily rose to the top and became the district attorney in 2004.
Harris spent nearly three decades in law enforcement and refers to herself as “top cop”, who has risen from local prosecutor to District Attorney of San Francisco and then Attorney General of California, according to Jeannie Suk Gersen, a writer for The New Yorker.
In 2012, Kamala pressed the state of California to settle a nationwide lawsuit against mortgage lenders for unfair practices, where she won the judgment and got a five- time higher sum than was originally offered.
However, Kamala also refused to defend Proposition 8, which banned same sex marriage in the state of California. With the uprising discussions and heat from the media, Kamala chose to not ban same sex marriage and this helped her launch her book: Smart on Crime. Her book was seen as a model for dealing with the problem of criminal recidivism, according to writer Gregory Lewis Mcnamee.
In 2019, Harris published her first memoir: “The Truths We Hold,” where she talks about how she faced questions, from early on, of “how I, as a black woman, could countenance being part of ‘the machine’ putting more young men of color behind bars.”
But she also wrote that “there must be serious consequences for people who commit serious crimes,” and expressed particular pride in her work in increasing sentences for “Johns who paid to have sex with underage girls,” and treating the crime like child sexual assault. She added that she didn’t feel the same way about “less serious crimes,” for which “mostly black or brown or poor men” were imprisoned. Harris wrote, “They represented a living monument to lost potential, and I wanted to tear it down.”
On November 7th during her first speech as Vice President-elect, Harris also noted the historic moment. “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she said in Wilmington, Delaware.“ Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities, and to the children of our country, regardless of your gender, our country has sent you a clear message: Dream with ambition, lead with conviction and see yourselves in a way that others may not, simply because they’ve never seen it before. But know that we will applaud you every step of the way,” she concluded.