Her name means Lotus in Sanskrit. Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions said her questioning “makes me nervous”. She made a YouTube video to teach Senator Mark Warner how to make a decent tuna melt.
And yesterday California Senator Kamala Harris made history as the first Black woman and first woman of Indian descent to be named vice president on a major party ticket.
When Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden announced Harris as his running mate, the firsts started to roll in:
first graduate of an historically black college or university (HBCU) to be nominated as vice president;
first South-Asian-American, second African American woman, and third woman from California to be elected to the Senate from California;
first Jamaican-American and Indian American woman to serve as California attorney general (twice);
California’s first African American district attorney;
and a first-generation American.
Hers is an American story that Harris attributes to her mother.
Kamala Devi Harris was born in 1964 in Oakland, Calif. Her parents emigrated to the United States to pursue doctorates at the University of California at Berkeley: her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, arrived from India in 1960 to study endocrinology, and father Donald came from Jamaica in 1961 to study economics. They were active in the civil rights movement at Berkeley, and Harris credits their activism for her interest in justice and the law.
After her parents’ divorce, Kamala’s mother, a renowned breast cancer researcher, moved them to Montreal to accept a position at McGill University. Kamala attended high school there, leaving Canada after graduating in 1981 to attend Howard University in Washington, DC.
During the primary campaign for president last year (from which she withdrew in December) Harris spoke frequently about her mother, who died in 2009 of colon cancer.
“My mother raised me and my sister,” she said at a campaign event in Iowa. “She was a proud woman. She was a woman with a heavy accent. She was a woman who many times people would overlook or not take seriously — or because of her accent would assume things about her intelligence. Now, every time my mother proved them wrong. Every time she proved them wrong because of who my mother was, and what she believed — what she had the ability to dream was possible — and then work to make possible. The fact that my mother never asked anyone for permission to tell her what was possible is why, within one generation, I stand here as a serious candidate for president of the United States.”
Harris graduated from Howard in 1985 with a double major in political science and economics, and returned to California to attend the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She earned her law degree in 1989, passed the California bar a year later, and began her career working as an assistant district attorney.
She would win elections as district attorney twice before running for — and winning — two terms as California attorney general. In 2016 she was elected to the United States Senate, where she currently serves on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Committee on the Judiciary, and the Committee on the Budget.
Harris will accept her party’s nomination as vice president next week during the Democratic National Convention. She will become the third woman to do so, after Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Republican Sarah Palin in 2008.
“You can’t know who Kamala Harris is without knowing who our mother was,” Maya Harris said yesterday on Twitter. “Missing her terribly, but know she and the ancestors are smiling today.”