Chicago (USA), Aug 22 (EFE).- Kamala Harris will become this Thursday thethe first African-American woman and the first person of South Asian descent to win the nomination of a major US party.. She will do so after Democrats have described her as a strong woman, A warrior of “freedom” and “joy” able to defeat the former president and Republican candidate, Donald Trump.
Harris, 59, has had his career marked by firsts: He was the first black district attorney and the first woman to serve as attorney general in California; the first Indian-American to serve in the Senate and the first woman to serve as Vice President of the United States.
Harris, however, insists on running in these elections as the “underdog” and has chosen not to put the historic character that her eventual arrival at the White House would have at the forefront, in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.
In her biography, ‘The Truths We Hold’, Harris explains that she prefers to describe herself simply as “an American” and says she has always been comfortable with her identity as a mixed-race woman, which Trump is now using to cast doubt on whether she is African-American enough.
Fiscal
Her name, which Republicans pretend not to know how to pronounce in order to attack her, means “lotus flower”, a type of plant that grows underwater and only emerges to the surface when its roots are well planted in the bottom.
Born on October 20, 1964 in Oakland, California, she is the eldest daughter of immigrant couple Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher from India, and Donald Harris, an economist from Jamaica, who divorced when she was seven years old.
His mother, who died in 2009, was a central figure in his life and the person he turned to at a time that marked his professional and personal future.
During her teenage years, her best friend from high school confessed to her that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather. Faced with this terrible situation, Harris did not hesitate to call her mother, her confidant, to make the necessary arrangements so that her friend could move in with them.
That incident sparked Harris’s calling, and he then decided that he would dedicate himself to protecting victims of any crime. Between 2004 and 2011 he was district attorney in San Francisco and between that last year and 2017 he served as fiscal general de California.
Nomination
In 2016, she won a seat in the Senate and quickly stood out for her incisive questions to members of Donald Trump’s government (2017-2021), as well as to two judges nominated by him to the Supreme Court, including Brett Kavanaugh, accused of sexual abuse.
In 2020, she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, but struggled to define her agenda and was seen by some voters as insufficiently authentic. US President Joe Biden eventually became the party’s nominee and chose her for vice president.
Once in the White House, Harris has barely been able to shine and has been labelled a mediocre communicator and a difficult boss to work with. Biden tasked her with tackling the “root causes” of migration in Central America, a “cursed” issue in US politics that has remained unresolved for decades.
As part of that work, he traveled to Guatemala, where he was involved in one of his most controversial moments when he told migrants trying to enter the United States: “Don’t come,” in what was interpreted as words lacking empathy.
Harris quickly moved away from that topic and began expanding her agenda with initiatives to address the epidemic of gun violence in the United States.
Abortion
Nevertheless, It was in the defense of the right to abortion that she finally found her voice.Harris became the administration’s chief spokesperson on the issue, channeling the outrage felt by millions of women when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down federal protections for abortion rights in 2022.
Following Biden’s decision to end his campaign, Harris quickly built her presidential campaign around the concept of freedom: Freedom for women to make decisions about their bodies and freedom for every American to aspire to a better life.
With Beyoncé’s song ‘Freedom’ as an anthemHarris has toured the country with the slogan “We will not back down.” Her central message is that the United States must choose between two visions: a country marked by Trump’s “chaos,” “fear,” and “hatred,” or one of “freedom” and “hope.”
At the Democratic convention in Chicago, which began last Monday, where Harris will accept the nomination tonight, the former president Barack Obama He has presented her as the successor to the “hope” movement that brought him to the White House in 2008.
Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, has described her as a “joyful warrior,” praising her hearty laugh, a trait Trump has tried to use against her.
Tonight, Harris will take the stage at the convention to define herself, in all her nuances. EFE
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