She was the first woman to become Vice President of the United States of America and is now the Democrats’ hope to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House, after Joe Biden dropped out of the race. She is the daughter of immigrants, went to protests when she was still in a stroller and could make history again. “We have 107 days until Election Day. Together, we will fight. And together, we will win,” she said.
After losing the Democratic primaries in 2020, Kamala decided to ally herself with Joe Biden to face Donald Trump. She became vice president and during her term she tried to stand out by implementing progressive measures. She was put in charge of controlling the border with Mexico, but illegal immigration has tripled compared to the years of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Daughter of activists
The daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964. Her parents, Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher, and Donald Harris, an economist, immigrated to the United States and met while they were both graduate students at the University of California. They have always been involved in activism, taking their daughter to human rights demonstrations as a baby.
According to the newspaper The New York Times, When Kamala was seven, her parents divorced and she was placed under her mother’s care. It was from this time that she became more exposed to Indian and African culture. “My mother was determined that we would grow up to be confident and proud black women.”
At the age of 12, he moved to Canada with his mother and sister, where he remained until he finished 12th grade. After graduating from high school, he returned to the United States to attend Howard University, a historically black school in Washington, D.C. “The beauty of Howard was that every sign told the students that we could be anything—that we were young, talented, and black, and that we should not let anything get in the way of our success,” he wrote in his biography.
Career as a prosecutor
After graduating from Howard, she earned a law degree in 1989 from the University of California and became an assistant district attorney for Alameda County. It was the beginning of a prestigious career that included serving as attorney general from 2011 to 2017, also in California, where she fought against violent and serious crimes such as homicide and human trafficking.
Harris said she became a prosecutor because she wanted to change a criminal justice system that “disproportionately affects minorities.”
During her 2020 campaign, Harris promised to reduce mass incarceration and address racial inequities in the justice system. As attorney general, she began implicit bias training for police officers, and as district attorney, she launched a program that allowed first-time, nonviolent offenders to have their charges dropped if they completed professional training. But critics have criticized her for working in court to uphold California’s death penalty and for threatening parents of truant students with criminal charges.
“The high rate of people of color incarcerated in her home state largely explains the difficulty she has had in selling her candidacy to black voters across the country,” says an expert, quoted by Los Angeles Times.
“Difficult” person for employees
According to the portal Axiosmuch of Kamala Harris’s staff has changed over the past three years. Of the 47 staffers listed in 2021, only five still work for the vice president. That was not the case under Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, the current US president.
Some former aides said Kamala Harris was very demanding and would even confront staffers to the point of making them uncomfortable.
Non-consensual among Democrats
Despite appearing to many as the obvious choice to replace Joe Biden and face Donald Trump in the upcoming election, Kamala was not mentioned in the letter sent to the US president by 24 Democrats. For some senior Democrats, there is some hesitation about whether Harris will be able to beat the Republican tycoon.
Harris’s aides have at times suspected that Biden’s team was reluctant to give Harris a chance to shine to avoid her being seen as a viable alternative to the current president ahead of his bid for a second term.
Source: www.cmjornal.pt
