Kamala Harris, the daughter of immigrants who has broken racial barriers at every step of her political career, is set to become the first Black woman and first Asian American to accept a major party’s vice-presidential nomination on Wednesday night.
In the most consequential speech of her political career, Harris, 55, is expected to urge voters to reject the divisive and destructive leadership of a president who “turns our tragedies into political weapons”.
Early excerpts show she will sketch an optimistic vision for a nation whose promise drew her parents from opposite ends of the world decades before.
“We’re at an inflection point,” she will say, speaking from a waterfront convention center near Joe Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware. “The constant chaos leaves adrift. The incompetence makes us feel afraid. The callousness makes us feel alone. It’s a lot – and here’s the thing: we can do better and deserve so much more.”
At the very beginning of Wednesday’s event, Harris gave a short direct-to-camera speech about the importance of voting in November’s election. She said she knew many of the viewers may have “heard about obstacles and misinformation, and folks making it harder for you to cast your ballot.”
She offered directions to viewers on how they could get more information on ways to vote in this election – a short plea underscoring Democrats’ efforts to increase turnout.
Harris, only the fourth woman in history to be nominated for a presidential ticket, will share a stage on Wednesday – one hundred years and one day after the ratification of the 19th amendment that guaranteed the women – with Hillary Clinton, the first woman nominated by a major party for the presidency, and Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker and highest-ranking woman in American political history.
Born in 1964 to Shyamala Gopalan, a Indian-born American breast cancer researcher, and Donald Harris, an American economist from Jamaica, Harris will recount their political activism and said some of her earliest memories of attending civil rights protests as a toddler.
Harris and her sister, Maya, were raised by her mother, who she will say taught her “to walk by faith, and not by sight”.
Maya, Harris’s niece Meena, and Harris’s step-daughter Ella Emhoff are expected to nominate Harris on Wednesday night.
After graduating from Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, DC, Harris pursued a career in criminal justice. In 2003, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco and the attorney general of California before becoming only the second Black woman to serve in the Senate.
It is this chapter of her career that Harris struggled to reconcile during her own presidential campaign, when confronted by progressives over her record as a prosecutor.
But on Wednesday, the Democrats mostly celebrated her historic ascensions. Harris’s presence on stage Wednesday was not preordained.
During the first Democratic primary debate last year, Harris confronted Biden over his past opposition to school bussing policies and his working relationship with segregationist senators. The attack wounded Biden, who had centered his campaign around the promise to restore the soul of the nation.
After her own presidential campaign fizzled and she dropped out of the race late year, Harris returned to the Senate, where she found her voice in the midst of nationwide protests over racial injustice. She joined protesters on the street and delivered a deeply personal speech on the Senate floor about being Black in America. She sponsored police reform legislation and championed a bill to make lynching a federal crime.
Harris’s speech caps the third night of the Democrats’ national convention, which moved almost entirely online due to the coronavirus pandemic. Other speakers include Clinton and Barack Obama, who is expected to warn that Donald Trump poses a threat to American democracy.
Source: Elections - theguardian.com
