US Elections

Kamala Harris: Yes we KAM?

Her first name Kamala means “lotus” in Sanskrit: “A flower on the water that never gets wet and finds its roots in the mud. It is important to know where you come from”, she used to explain. Her middle name, Devi, means “goddess”. His parents met in 1962 at the University of California, Berkeley. His father, Donald Harris, was a Jamaican student and his mother, Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian student from Tamil Nadu. On campus, the young couple frequented the black American left, and in particular one of the founders of the Black Panthers, Huey Newton. Kamala’s father has become a professor of economics, and her mother an endocrinologist.

When their parents divorced, Kamala and her younger sister Maya followed their mother to Quebec and went to school in French. Kamala returned to the USA to study law, before joining the California Bar, where she rose through the ranks. At the age of 29, she had an affair with Willie Brown, an African American politician thirty years her senior and future mayor of San Francisco, who appointed her to two state commissions. She was elected District Attorney of San Francisco in 2004 and then Attorney General of California (2011-2017). This makes her the first woman and the first African American to head the judiciary in the country’s most populous state.

Prosecutor Harris 

Not only does the USA hold the record for the highest rate of incarceration in the world (1.77 million prisoners), but its justice system is terribly unequal: a defendant who cannot afford a good lawyer must resign himself to “pleading guilty”. The poor are over-represented in prison: African Americans, who make up 13% of the population, account for 40% of prisoners. Afro-American activists are therefore not happy about Kamala Harris’s past: “She’s a cop”, they took offence when Kamala ran in the Democratic primary. She admits to being less left-wing than her parents. A refocusing that shocks the wokes, but could prove crucial on 5 November, by reassuring moderate right-wing voters, disgusted by the fascisation of the Republican party under Trump. Liz Cheney (daughter of Dick Cheney, George W. Bush’s “neocon” ex-Vice-President and architect of the war in Iraq), for example, appears at a meeting with the Democratic candidate.

Kamala Harris reminds her critics on the left that in 2005, as a prosecutor, she launched a rehabilitation programme, “Back on Track”, to keep first-time offenders out of prison. After the subprime crisis, she also passed a law in California to prevent the eviction of small homeowners (homeowner bill of rights). In short, it is inane to accuse the first Asian and second African American woman elected to the Senate of being indifferent to the racial inequalities that plague the USA. Her husband Douglas Emhoff, a divorced New York lawyer and father of two, described how Kamala “made him aware of the privilege of being white” in this country.

The daughter of a Jamaican man and an Indian woman, Kamala has also been criticised for not being a “real” African American. Yet his ancestors were African slaves deported to the plantations of Jamaica. Harris recalls his “first demonstrations in a pushchair.” “I was born Black, and I’ll die Black, I’m not going to apologise to people who don’t understand that”, she had to justify herself.

On the right, between two racist allusions, they castigate Harris, who turns 60 on 20 October, for not having had any children. In 2021, Trump’s running mate J.D Vance called her a “miserable cat lady in her life” who would have “no interest” in the future of the country. Vance pretends to forget that Angela Merkel did not have any children either!

Discreet but determined

Signs reading “Kamala 2024” had been blooming since November 2020 at rallies celebrating Biden’s victory. She was careful not to show any ambition. A discreet Vice-Chairwoman, for four years she kept her image as a modern, sexy woman. Wearing Converse trainers, she embodied the energy so lacking in the bedridden Joe Biden:  one day, in the rain (and in front of the cameras…), she even danced to the track Work That by rapper Mary J. Blige. A “cool attitude” that does not prevent her from being stubborn in the face of her opponents, as she proved again on 10 September during her only debate with Trump.

On 27 June, the Republican tribune crushed the senile Biden live on air: “I have no idea what he’s trying to say, and I don’t think he does either!” But in front of Kamala, twenty years his junior, Trump looked like a man from the past. He had shown himself incapable of arguing and replying to the former prosecutor. The confrontation chilled Trump so much that he refused to debate Harris again. Not for fear of losing his fans – they idolise him and are deaf to rational arguments – but for fear of swaying the undecideds, centrists, and moderates who, on Tuesday 5 November, will decide the fate of the United States. And, consequently, from the rest of the world…