The fifty-year-old, who has obtained the support of Joe Biden, seems to be continuing her “mission”: to break the various “glass ceilings” that rise above her, as her close friends confided to franceinfo in 2021.
Published
Update
Reading time: 5 min
A bolt from the blue from the White House: Joe Biden announced on Sunday, July 21, that he was giving up on running for a second term. Immediately, his vice-president Kamala Harris said she was ready to replace him for “beat trump“in a Democratic campaign now plunged into the unknown. Like a new challenge.
This announcement, expected despite repeated denials from the main person concerned, disrupts a campaign that has already experienced many twists and turns, first and foremost the attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July 13. Aged 59, Kamala Harris displays a youthful image compared to Donald Trump, 78, who emerged this week strengthened from the nomination convention that saw the Republican Party rally behind his candidacy.
And more than ever, the first African-American woman to have acceded to the vice-presidency of the United States seems determined to pursue her destiny which seems to break one by one the famous “glass ceilings” that rise above her. To understand it, we return to her footsteps, in California, where Kamala Harris was born on October 20, 1964. It is also in this state on the west coast of the United States that she has built her entire career.
:quality(50)/2021/01/19/phpnONWY3.jpg)
In January 2021, franceinfo went there: starting with his elementary school, on the hills of Berkeley near San Francisco. A small school where the portrait of Kamala Harris is now painted on a wall. It is a “model”, says Lily, 11, who is playing in the yard. “She’s really cool and it’s motivating.”
“She represents what you can achieve by going to this school, being a woman and even being a woman of color.”
Lily, 11, attends the same elementary school as Kamala Harristo franceinfo
In the early 1970s, this was a mostly white neighborhood. Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian woman and a Jamaican man who came to study in California, lives in a black neighborhood. She benefits from a desegregation program: a bus takes her here every day. Carole Porter, a childhood friend of the vice president, took that bus with her: “She might not have had the opportunity to be where she is today if it hadn’t been for that bus. She listened to her classes very attentively. She also had a natural leadership ability. She was an excellent mentor. For example, she took under her wing the adopted daughter of a neighbor.”. This neighbor worked on the ground floor of a house now painted yellow in the West Berkeley neighborhood.
:quality(50)/2021/01/19/phpNGjYfq.jpg)
The Harris family lived upstairs. Or at least not her father, because Kamala’s parents divorced. The economist and biologist had met while working as civil rights activists in college alongside Aubrey Labrie. “Kamala calls me Uncle Aubrey because I was a friend of her parents, said the octogenarian in 2021. We used to protest together. Kamala’s mother would take her to boycotts of segregated businesses, and Kamala still has that concern for justice today. I’m proud of what she’s accomplished…”
And then, step by step, obstacle by obstacle, Kamala Harris built her career. Inspired by her mother, she won the support of local Democratic leaders and became the first woman of color elected district attorney of San Francisco in 2003, then attorney general of California in 2010. Louise Renne, former director of legal services in San Francisco, had recruited her early in her career. “Kamala can be tough, when she needs to be tough. She’s thoughtful, but she’s also very caring, Louise Renne told us. The first day we went through adoption procedures, Kamala said to me, ‘Louise, I have stuffed animals for the children and their families,’ and that showed me someone who understood the emotion of that moment.”
:quality(50)/2021/01/19/php2aY6ya.jpg)
From her years as prosecutor, Kamala Harris highlights her progressive record: refusal to seek the death penalty, program for the reintegration of ex-prisoners.
Anti-racist associations criticize him for his passivity on cases of police shootings of black men. “I can tell you that in the office the progressives did not like him, testified Chris Tiedemann, a former California deputy attorney general. She was a bad administrator and very reluctant to go after big companies. I have a close colleague who had files on tobacco companies that were targeting minors. He couldn’t go after them. She didn’t want to do anything that would hurt her career.”
Kamala Harris’ ambition led her to Washington. In 2016, she became the first woman of South Asian origin to be elected senator (from California). She was noted for her close questioning of ministers and senior officials before launching into the primary. “She asked good questions, but did she bring money to California? Did she help us with Covid? The answer is no, says Loretta Sanchez, a former Democratic representative who was defeated by Kamala Harris for the seat of senator from California. Out of four years in the Senate, she spent two campaigning for president. She doesn’t have a lot of experience at the federal level. But she’s smart and if she works on her files, I’m hopeful she’ll succeed.”
A success story which has been written for six years alongside her husband Doug Emhoff, whose children call Kamala Harris “Momala“, the image of a modern blended family: without flinching, or almost, he left his law firm to become “second gentleman” of the United States… before perhaps one day becoming “First Gentleman”? Here then is the last glass ceiling to break for Kamala Harris: that of the White House.