She is a woman. She is Asian. She is African. She is an immigrant in the US. She is beyond dreams – the Vice President of the US – She is a leader. She is an inspiration. She is a personification of hard work, good education, persistence! She is a representation of unity in diversity and inclusivity.
Kamala Devi Harris created history on January 20, 2021, when she became the first Indian-American woman, the first person of Indian-American descent to be sworn in as the Vice President of the US.
Born on October 20, 1964, to immigrant parents and simply identifying as American, she has broken many glass ceilings in her journey. Her father, Donald Harris, a Stanford University professor emeritus of economics, had immigrated to the US in 1961 from British Jamaica. He wanted to find the right prospect of growth away from the slavery of the British. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher and civil rights activist from Chennai, had moved to the US in 1958, the time when India was reeling in post-independence poverty. She had unexpectedly applied to a Master of science in Nutrition and Endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley, and was accepted. Kamala shares that her mother couldn’t in fact stay in touch regularly with her parents back in India; the only mode of communication between countries was aerogram back then which was indeed a long process.
The credit for Shyamala’s success was a lot to her parents who always encouraged their kids to achieve the best and, in fact, used their retirement savings to send her to the US at a time when other Indian parents would have hesitated to send their 18-year-old girl alone to study abroad.
Kamala has largely been inspired by her mother who would go on to achieve big things.
The Right Foundation
Shyamala brought up her two daughters as single parent. Kamala, in her autobiography, wrote, “... my mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters... She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as black girls and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women”.
Kamala’s activism was shaped by her mother who took her strapped to a stroller to Civil Rights movement marches. These early experiences inspired her to fight against injustice. In fact, her parents had met during a meeting of the Afro-American Association in Berkeley where her father was a lead speaker and her mother in the audience.
Growing up in Oakland, she adapted well to both Indo-American and Afro-American cultures. Kamala’s mother took the girls to spend time with her grandparents in India during the summer but also made sure her girls were connected to their African roots.
Kamala has studied at Howard University, the University of California and Hastings College of Law in San Francisco to begin her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. Taking inspiration from her parents, she too was leader at work and in 2003, she was happily elected as the District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco.
Breaking the Glass Ceiling
In the process of breaking the glass ceilings, Kamala’s first was in 2010, when she was elected to serve as California’s Attorney General – the first Asian-American, the first Afro-American and the first woman.
During her tenure as the Attorney General, she married lawyer Douglas Emhoff and became stepmother to his two children, Cole and Ella. Upon graduation from Colorado College with a Bachelor of Art in Psychology, was an assistant at William Morris Endeavor before taking up the job of an executive assistant at Plan B Entertainment. Ella is a star already having featured in the music video for Bo Burnham’s song, Repeat Stuff. She has also been a star swimmer for school and college. She went to a school in and then went to Parsons School of Design to major in apparel and textiles and has already collaborated with designers of repute.
In 2016, she was elected as a Senator for California, becoming only the second Afro-American woman to ever be elected to the Senate in the history of the US.
While in the Senate, she served on the Intelligence Committee and the Judiciary Committee. She aggressively stood up for and promoted healthcare reform and federal de-scheduling of cannabis. She advocated for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the DREAM Act, a ban on assault weapons and progressive tax reform. She built herself a reputation as a sharp, aggressive questioner who could unnerve opposing witnesses.
In 2019, she launched her campaign to lead the country as its president. The US chose Joe Biden to lead them and Kamala, but Biden, the President of the US, chose her as the Vice President of the US, to lead the Biden-Harris Administration – an even larger leadership role in the US. She was thus the fourth woman on a major party’s national ticket and the second Afro-American on a presidential ticket.
Creating History
On the evening of November 7, 2020, standing on an outdoor stage in Wilmington, Delaware, Kamala’s words created a historical impact – an impact that rightfully deserved the loud applause that it received. “When my mother came here from India at the age of 19, maybe she didn’t quite imagine this moment. But she believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible. So, I’m thinking about her and about the generations of women – black women, Asian, white, Latina and Native American women throughout our nation’s history who have paved the way for this moment tonight. But while I may be the first woman in this office, I won’t be the last. Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”