Kamala Harris Elected as the First Asian American US Vice President

Saturday morning, the press, after the latest batch of ballots were counted in Pennsylvania, called the presidential election for Joe Biden. By doing that, Americans made history by also electing the first woman and Asian American Vice President, Kamala Harris:

“Yet what also distinguished her was her personal biography: The daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, she was steeped in racial justice issues from her early years in Oakland and Berkeley, Calif., and wrote in her memoir of memories of the chants, shouts and “sea of legs moving about” at protests.

Allies say Ms. Harris is acutely aware of her place in history. She views her work as connected to both the civil rights leaders who came before her — the “ancestors,” as she calls them — and the generations she hopes to empower.

Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, a rising figure in the party’s left wing, said Ms. Harris’s ascent was a deep source of pride among South Asians, expanding the imaginations of how high they can climb in American public life. Ms. Jayapal has spoken proudly of her own connection to the new vice president, writing an op-ed article in The Los Angeles Times in August describing their intertwined family history in South India.”

Although I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have been civically active, I’ve never personally met Harris. I have seen her speak, most recently, over a year ago, at the California Democratic Party convention when it was held in San Francisco:

Congratulations to Vice President Elect Kamala Harris!

 

Thanks for rating this! Now tell the world how you feel - .
How does this post make you feel?
  • Excited
  • Fascinated
  • Amused
  • Disgusted
  • Sad
  • Angry

About John

I'm a Taiwanese-American and was born & raised in Western Massachusetts, went to college in upstate New York, worked in Connecticut, went to grad school in North Carolina and then moved out to the Bay Area in 1999 and have been living here ever since - love the weather and almost everything about the area (except the high cost of housing...)
This entry was posted in Current Events, Politics and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.