If you want to understand where Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s new vice-presidential nominee, is coming from, listen to her talk about Berkeley, Calif. — the city where she spent the first dozen years of her life. Listen, in particular, to how she talks about Berkeley to black audiences.
It’s a story that Harris has told many times before. The reason she relies on it is to explain, and defend, what happened next. Inspired by the “heroes” of her childhood — from civil rights icons such as Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley to the “first generation of black lawyers” to emerge from her “community” in Berkeley — she decided to become a lawyer too.“So my family gathered ’round and said, ‘OK, Kamala, so what are you gonna do in your fight for justice?’” Harris recalled.
In other words, to understand where Kamala Harris is coming from — to understand the choice that has both defined and complicated her career, and that has now propelled her to the brink of the vice presidency — you have to understand what she learned, as a young woman, about the power and limitations of being on “the outside, banging down the door on bended knee.”
Shyamala, a star student and nationally recognized singer, graduated from the University of Delhi at 19, then left home for California. Diminutive, dark-skinned and attuned to injustice, she “chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in [Berkeley’s] black community” from “almost the moment she arrived,” Harris writes in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold.” “It was the foundation of her new American life.
“I was awed by them,” says early member Aubrey Labrie, whom Kamala eventually came to know as “Uncle Aubrey.” “They were intimidatingly smart. They had a determined kind of posture about them.” The people close to Kamala Harris’s parents were never Black Panthers. But they did embrace an embryonic version of the philosophy that later came to be known as “Black Power”: black pride, black autonomy and the creation of black political and cultural institutions. According to Labrie, Shyamala Gopalan was the original study group’s only non-black member — the exception that proved the rule.
Harris was too young, of course, to remember precisely which protests her parents attended, but her memoir offers some hints.
An that’s NOT A GOOD THING! Radical & Anti-American, hippy dippy drug infected BS
It’s a historic day for Black women, South Asian women, women of color, women everywhere, for America.
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