Kamala Harris

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/10/933631207/claim-us-if-youre-famous Claim Us If You're Famous November 10, 202011:01 PM ET By Kumari Devarajan Vice president-elect Kamala Harris, front center, with, from left, her grandfather, sister, mother and grandmother in 1972. Twitter/ @mayaharris_ Unless you've been living under a (really, really large) rock, you know that Kamala Harris is the vice president-elect—and has shattered a lot of glass ceilings. Come January, she'll be the first woman and first daughter of immigrants and first woman of color to hold the role of VP. And different people point out different aspects of her multiracial identity; after all, she's Black and Asian and South Asian and Indian American. So this week on the show, we're talking about what exactly it means for Kamala Harris to be the United States' first Black-South-Asian-multiracial-female-vice-president-elect. We get into a lot of messy territory, like what her political prominence might help illuminate (or obscure) about South Asian political identity, how multiracial people are perceived, and how Blackness intersects with all of those things. To help us make sense of all of that, we talked to Nitasha Sharma, an associate professor of African American Studies and Asian American studies at Northwestern University. Here's the extended cut of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity. Back when Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination, what sorts of things were you noticing in the way that people were talking about her racial identity? On the one hand, among Black folks on Twitter, there was a response to how Harris has really identified as a Black woman. So I think people were really excited about that possibility. But also, among progressives, it was more about her politics and her policies rather than her identity, although those things happen at once. On the other hand, among South Asians, people knew that she was Indian. And I think that's what was really critical for a lot of South Asians. But now that she's been out a little longer, Asian Americans as a whole have embraced that part of her. And then finally, of course, the immigrant narrative: A lot of us are the children of immigrants, and I think that speaks to a lot of folks. So there's a lot of kind of mainstream celebration of Kamala Harris being the first Black and South Asian woman to run for the Democratic VP ticket. On the other hand, people are saying that it's not really about her background. We know that there are Black people, for instance, who don't have policies that are good for Black people. All skinfolk ain't kinfolk. Even if you are a particular identity, it doesn't mean politically that you're going to pass laws and legislation that is good for that broader community. You say that among Asian Americans, South Asians were the first to claim Kamala Harris, then Asian Americans more broadly. I'm curious about that process, how fast or slow that happens, and what that says about the politics within the Asian American community. That's a really great question. So, you know, South Asians sort of came into the umbrella of Asian American more recently. "Asian" in the United States has often been typified as the face of an East Asian person — somebody who might be Japanese or Korean, maybe Vietnamese, Chinese. And this has to do with immigration patterns to the United States, and the U.S.'s global relations with Asia, which initially had been with East Asia. Immigrants who came here were first Chinese, then Japanese, Koreans and Filipinos. South Asians came a little bit after Kamala Harris's mother came from India, and that is from the 1965 Immigration Act. So on the one hand, when we think about Asian Americans, we think East Asian. On the other hand, a lot of South Asians don't consider themselves to be Asian American. Part of it, especially after 9/11, is because we look different. We're racialized differently. We are considered to be Brown. And people might mix up a person who's from India with someone who is Latino or Mexican. So there's a different racial process to that. At the same time, Asian American is a political identity. So the folks who are, say, academics in Asian American studies on university campuses can see a ready identification with Kamala Harris as part of the Asian immigrant story. But Kamala Harris is not an "Asian American" to some South Asians and Indian Americans—she's Indian. So I think that there's those various levels, and Kamala can be all of those things. And it really is interesting when we pay attention to who she claims to be. South Asians seem to have long known that Kamala Harris was Indian—but why might others only know that she's Black? I always knew she was Indian because she has the same name as my auntie in the village in India. Kamala is an Indian name, and her middle name is Devi— a South Asian middle name. So, right off the bat when you see "Kamala Devi Harris," you know that she is Indian, or her parents had some interest in India, because we know that there are jazz musicians who are African American who name their children with South Asian names But in general, it's true that people will look at her and listen to her story about how she identifies and reduce her to being Black. And that is not necessarily a negative thing. That's how she self-identifies as well. She is a Black woman. She was born and raised in Oakland, California, and she grew up in the '60s. She knew people who founded Black studies departments. And she was around the civil rights and Black nationalist movements in the Bay Area. She went to a historically Black university. But when we think about race in the U.S. or people are talking about racial issues, they're often using "race" as a code word for "Black." And so the primary paradigm that this nation was founded on was a Black and white paradigm. The invisibility of Harris' Indian-ness is an allegory for the racial position of Asians in the United States. We are generally invisible, irrelevant, it seems, to the conversation of race. So when we talk about Kamala Harris' race, people often will only speak about her as a Black woman. And that's the way race operates in the United States. With all the things that you were hearing about her identity, was there anything that surprised you about that conversation? I'm not surprised that there's a lot of celebration among many Americans, but also within the Black community and particularly among Black women. We saw the same with Obama, so in the same way, that's not that surprising. What is surprising to me is that people are picking up that she's also South Asian. Right? So that means that people are picking up on her multiracial identity and that she's not like Obama. She's not like what we generally think of as a mixed person and then question their Blackness— as people did with Obama—because she's not white. Her father's Black, from Jamaica, and her mom is South Indian. And so what is surprising is that people are willing to grapple with the fact that she is not, "just Black." Black is expansive enough to embrace and include all kinds of multiracial people. Most people of African descent in the United States who have been here for generations have European and Indigenous ancestry. But the one-drop rule works in such a way in, you know, as developed from the times of slavery to increase the number of Black people, to increase the number of slaves. It can be a way to define community in a proud way and expansive way—that if you're Black, you're Black. On the other hand, that really leads to a distrust of people who claim multiracial identity. That's because, like with Obama, most people think claiming "mixed race" as an identity is an anti-Black move or a move away from Blackness, because the assumption is that you're moving toward your white identity or light-skinned privileges. Kamala Harris changes the whole conversation on that. How do these dynamics play out on a national political stage, and what's different between Barack Obama and Kamala Harris? Harris and Obama are both very aware of racial dynamics as politicians and their desires to appeal to a broad base. So the way that they handle their racial identity and their affiliations will be very self-aware, especially on the main stage when they're running for political office. Obama was raised by his white mom in Honolulu and by his grandparents who are white. His father was in Kenya and passed away. And so he would speak about his white family and sometimes would bring them on stage. And that really had some audiences saying, OK, he's trying to do this strategically and he's trying to affiliate with white people and appeal to white audiences. And that is often, by some, read as a move away from Blackness. There's not the ability among Americans, with regard to race, to understand that one can be both, and—not either, or. In the vice presidential debate, Kamala Harris talked about her mom as an immigrant, but she didn't talk about her racial background. She didn't give us the immigrant story with the specifics that she does in other interviews. And I think that that's interesting as well. Her mom has passed away, and so she doesn't have her on stage with her. She seems to be estranged from her father, so he doesn't appear on stage with her. So it has to do with how she looks, how she presents herself and the narratives that she picks from her background and her experiences. And that's how it plays out on stage as audiences are watching. We think we understand what a Black woman is and what that signifies—but she has to choose to call to the surface her South Asian-ness. It makes me giggle a little bit that with Kamala Harris, Indians are so proud of her and Indians are also, generally speaking, so anti-Black. I love my Indian community, but we have issues. The main voice for South Asians in America are North Indians like my father. And the person that they get to celebrate in this moment is a woman — the daughter of a very independent South Indian woman who came before the mainstream Immigration Act of '65 and chose to marry a Black man. Does the fact that Indians and South Asians identify with her and claim her surprise you? I mean, can you see an alternative where her being Black is just too much of an obstacle for her to be this esteemed figure for South Asians? Elections What Do Americans With South Asian Heritage Think Of Kamala Harris As VP Pick? Oh, for sure. It tickles me, because she's so respectable, and she's doing all the things, right? She's not crazy progressive. She is highly educated. She is well-dressed. She's married to a nice white man. She's done all the things that Desis approve of. She's not a doctor or engineer, but she did go through law school. So she fits the stereotype and the image of what South Asian immigrants want to celebrate. And as the children of South Asian immigrants, we know those pressures. You are not supposed to marry Black, and you are not supposed to listen to hip hop or affiliate with Black people. But people identify with her as South Asian because she is the respectable, centrist, accomplished image of South Asians in the United States. Now, if she was someone who was super progressive, or was an artist, or a sexually explicit rapper, I'm not so sure South Asians would be like, yeah, Kamala Harris is our beacon of arrival in the United States. What does caste have to do with that? She's a Brahmin, and in the Indian caste system, Brahmins are at the top. And I think that this really overlays Indians' pride in her, especially in India, because she is the daughter of an upper-caste woman. It is not as if she is a Shatri or a Shudra or an "untouchable" or a Dalit, which would create some tension among Indians that she would be a representative of Indian arrival. Even given all the ways that she's "respectable," I'm still a little bit amazed that so many South Asians are openly embracing Kamala Harris, when, as you mentioned, anti-Blackness is still common among many South Asian communities. What do you make of that? Well, I think the South Asians don't really have a choice. I mean, there's probably some South Asians who are so anti-Black that they are not celebrating her. But, you know, there's a big enough Democratic South Asian presence who knows that they should not publicly be so anti-Black, so they can celebrate Kamala Harris as Indian, while understanding that she's also Black. But it doesn't mean that they'd want their sons to marry her. It's very liberal right now to be an American and to celebrate Kamala for both being Black and for being Indian. These kinds of dynamics are really complicated—and they're cross cut by a lot of things. Also, because there's so little representation of Asian Americans in real life, outside of the very few that are in the mainstream media or Hollywood, that we have to kind of grab onto anything that comes our way. And that is a devastating and sad part of racial politics in the United States, the true and deep and historic racial invisibility of Asian Americans. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/13/923369723/lets-talk-about-kamala-harris Let's Talk About Kamala Harris October 14, 202012:20 AM ET Gene Demby Not long ago, we dove into some of the big generational divides among Black Democratic voters. And in that episode — which we did right after Kamala Harris was named the Democratic nominee for vice president — we asked if we should explore her complicated history as a prosecutor. Y'all gave us a resounding hell yes. So this week, we're going long on Harris's history as a self-described "top cop" and "progressive prosecutor" in California. Over the last few years, voters in the Democratic party have moved to the left on issues of race and criminal justice, which has made things complicated for Harris during the 2020 presidential campaign. (Remember all the "Kamala is a cop" memes?) But since her start as a prosecutor in Oakland, Harris has always navigated tricky political terrain, says Jamilah King, a reporter at Mother Jones and Bay Area native who has written on Harris's early political career. We talked to King about that record, what it means to be a "progressive prosecutor," and why it's so tough to pin down Harris ideologically. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Tell us a little bit about the landscape that Harris was stepping into in the early 1990s, when she was beginning her career as a prosecutor. When Kamala Harris ran for public office in 2003, there was no such thing as a "progressive prosecutor." I think that's important to start with. And the person that she was replacing, Terrence Hallinan, was considered to be super progressive. And still, he prosecuted the last case in San Francisco that used the death penalty. So this was a very, very different era. Coming out of the '80s and '90s, there was still a lot of the "tough on crime" rhetoric that politicians needed to use to get elected. But thanks to the activism of a lot of folks who were formerly incarcerated and their families, we're starting to see the limitations of those policies. In her first race for district attorney, you said she was running against Hallinan, someone who was considered as progressive as prosecutors could have been back in the early '90s. So how was she pitching herself as a candidate against him? She was pitching herself as a "get-it-done" progressive. This was San Francisco, so everybody was more or less somewhere on the progressive spectrum. But she was definitely more on the moderate end of the progressive spectrum, so she talked a lot about bringing law and order to the streets. There was this sort of old-school rhetoric, like the Black folks in the neighborhood who are like, well, if they would just go to school and pull up their pants. I mean, Harris never said "pull up their pants." But we know that rhetoric, right? Like, if we can just give people the resources that they need to engage meaningfully in society, they'll do it. There was definitely this strain of personal responsibility that ran throughout what she was proposing. So she was running as a progressive, but she was a moderate progressive. Can you say more about what it meant to be a "progressive prosecutor" the way she was trying to be? She definitely tried to use that label to describe herself in her book, which she released shortly before she announced her run for president. But it never quite fit, right? It didn't quite make sense. I don't want to speculate about how Kamala Harris is coming to her racial identity, but I'm going to do it anyway. She talks a lot about being the daughter of immigrants. She talks a lot about, you know, growing up sort of in the shadow of the civil rights movement, which was its own display of respectability politics. She doesn't necessarily talk about growing up in the backyard of the Black Panthers in Oakland. She's the daughter of two professors.. She also went to Howard and pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha. And I love them — I have many AKAs in my life who I love and adore dearly — but they are not typically the folks with fists raised, trying to beat down the system. They very much have a political ideology built on being twice as good, on showing up in the crispest suit. One quote that I find interesting, that her mother gave an interview to a Bay Area reporter, basically said, she can definitely hang with all these people; she knows which forks to use at the dinner table. She's been in these spaces of power and privilege, and she is trying to wield them in a way that's beneficial to black folks. One of her signature programs when she was the district attorney of San Francisco was called "Back On Track." How did that program work? "Back On Track" was a relatively small program that Kamala Harris started in the San Francisco District Attorney's office. It was an alternative to incarceration for first-time nonviolent offenders. I spoke to one young woman who graduated from the program. She was in a tough spot. She was a college student. She was Black. She made a bad decision, started to sell drugs and got caught. And she was put in this "Back On Track" program, where the big thing was that participants had to plead guilty. So the participants would have a felony on their records. They would have a felony on their record, but that felony would be expunged if they finished the program. The program consisted of everything under the sun. It was an internship program, but it was also for other things: if you needed counseling, job preparation, or resume help. At one point, Kamala Harris and her staff realized that folks needed stress relief, and they wanted a gym membership. So she got 24 Hour Fitness to donate memberships to the program. And it was a pretty successful program, given how small it was. I think it's important to note, too, that she has always had a lot of political ambition and sought higher office for herself. And half of California is a deeply conservative state, so if she was going to run statewide, she needed to not be seen as someone who was making it easy for people who had broken the law to re-enter society. This was California. This is the land of "three strikes" sentencing laws. This is the same state that the Supreme Court said had such overcrowded prisons that it was functionally cruel and unusual to have prisoners incarcerated in them. So California is a deeply punitive state. You wrote that, in one point in her career, Harris declined to seek the death penalty in the case of a man who was convicted of killing a police officer. Can you tell us a little bit about her thinking and what the public response to that decision was? So in 2004, a few months after Kamala Harris took office, there was a shooting in Baby Hunter's Point, which is a predominantly black working class neighborhood in San Francisco. A young police officer named Isaac Espinosa was shot and killed. Kamala Harris had run on a platform that committed to not seeking the death penalty. [So as the district attorney and prosecutor on the case], she declined to pursue the death penalty. And at the time, it was a really controversial decision. Senator Dianne Feinstein was very opposed to Kamala Harris's decision and even said that if she'd known that Kamala Harris would have done something like this, she would not have supported her for district attorney. And California's police unions were incensed. So this made it harder for her when she decided to run for attorney general of the state. She had to really mend a lot of those bridges. In your reporting, you get at why it's so hard to pin her down ideologically. What are some some examples of conflicting policies that she supported, as the D.A. of San Francisco and then as the A.G. of California? As district attorney of San Francisco, she declined to pursue the death penalty. But as attorney general of California, she defended the state's use of the death penalty. She essentially said: look, I'm doing my job. It's the largest attorney general's office, second to the U.S. attorney general. And after the Supreme Court ruled that California had basically put way too many people in prison, her office argued that they needed to have these folks in prison because they were essential to prison labor. [Later, Harris told BuzzFeed that she hadn't known that was an argument that her office was taking. — Ed.] She's tried to distance herself from the more controversial decisions that her office made. She was in support of gay marriage. She co-sponsored a bill that outlawed the so-called "gay panic defense." But with marijuana legalization, it took her a while to come around to that — especially as someone whose signature program, "Back On Track," was largely geared toward nonviolent, first-time offenders who maybe sold weed, [her wariness] was a really big deal. But what she didn't do was make these grand gestures like her political cousin Gavin Newsom, who in 2004 legalized gay marriage in San Francisco and began officiating ceremonies. That was a huge grand gesture. But Kamala Harris, by virtue of her temperament and also her profession, was looking at the very specific details of how to actually change the law. And that, I think, doesn't warrant as much praise [from the public]. I think it's incredibly hard to create change from within law enforcement. She was within the confines of a law enforcement system and a criminal justice system that has been very, very slow to change. And only in the last five to ten years has there really been a large following around issues like prison abolition. So how much of this criticism of her prosecutorial record and the way she's navigated her career is about the specific social location she occupies as a Black woman? And how do we square that with legitimate concern about the overreach of the criminal justice system? I think it's important to look at what she's done in the Senate to really get a sense on who she is and how much her ideas now contradict what she did in office. For instance, after George Floyd was murdered, she ended up co-introducing legislation that would reform policing federally. It would introduce many federal mandates around how police act in different jurisdictions. And one of the ways that her legal experience came in handy was she was looking at the actual terminology that was being used to outlaw chokeholds. Because she knows the system, she was like, look, this isn't specific enough. You need to actually change the language so that it says something like, police officers cannot use any maneuvers that stop [breathing]. So I think in that instance, you see her law enforcement experience really coming up to the fore and being incredibly useful in her attempts to reform things. But I think another huge part of this is that she is a Black woman who was in elected office in an era when that just didn't really happen. And she was in law enforcement, no less. In the last four years, we've seen so much lip service paid to the fact that Black women have long been the backbone of the Democratic Party. But she was doing this 20 years ago. And I think just the game was different then. You didn't have a you didn't have sort of a mainstream Democratic electorate, or even a progressive Democratic electorate, that was pushing for the same issues that it's pushing for now. I think the circumstances in the specific landscape around her has changed. It's pushed her to articulate a vision that she believes in. But more importantly, it's made her be precise about how she's going to use her law enforcement experience to shift the systems that she's trying to change. How do people who experienced the criminal justice system under Kamala Harris's tenure —in San Francisco and later the state of California — think about her time as a prosecutor? That's a really important question. And it depends on how deep within the system you were. So there are folks like Jamal Trulove, a young Black man who grew up in San Francisco who was incarcerated for a murder that he was very clear that he didn't commit. And later, an appeals court found that Kamala Harris's office had overzealously prosecuted his case, despite there being evidence that he was innocent. He obviously is very, very critical of her record. I'm from San Francisco. I know folks who've been in the system and they'll just say flat out: "Look, she's a cop. She put us in jail." I'm not trying to try to [support her]. On the other hand, it's always been really telling for me that there are a lot of organizers and community groups within California and San Francisco's criminal justice reform system that are pretty ride-or-die for her. They don't agree necessarily with all of the decisions she's made, but they recognize that she was one of the few people to even give them a seat at the table. She's this complicated figure, but I think she's earned the respect of a lot of the people who are doing criminal justice work, who recognize what the confines are. They recognize what's possible, and they also recognize when she's wrong. That's not to say that everybody is in favor of her. But I think there's this long history in San Francisco specifically of sort of Black folks in elected office being a little bit more moderate than sort of the white progressives who end up getting the headlines. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/12/901859774/a-look-at-kamala-harris-career-as-a-u-s-senator A Look At Kamala Harris' Career As A U.S. Senator August 12, 20204:06 PM ET Kelsey Snell Kamala Harris has been a senator for nearly four years before becoming Joe Biden's VP pick. She doesn't have a long list of passed legislation, but she's known for aggressive questioning of witnesses. MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: Joe Biden is following in the footsteps of his former boss, President Obama, in picking a former rival as his running mate. But before Kamala Harris ran for president and challenged Biden on the debate stage, she was the junior senator from California. Well, she's still the junior senator from California, and it's in that role that she has made a name for herself as an aggressive questioner in Senate committee rooms. We're going to talk about Harris' Senate career and how that career has positioned her for this moment with NPR congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell. Hey, Kelsey. KELSEY SNELL, BYLINE: Hi there. KELLY: So Kamala Harris has only been Senator Harris for about 3 1/2 years - not so long in the grand scheme of Senate careers. How has she used her time there so far? SNELL: You know, not only is it not a lot of time in Senate time, but it's also time spent in the minority where it's notoriously difficult to get legislation passed. You know, her very first speech on the Senate floor was all about the DREAM Act, and that's the legislation to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are brought to the country as children. And that has been kind of a central issue for her. She also works on justice-related issues like due process for immigrants. And that police reform bill that passed the House earlier this summer, she was a major figure in that. You know, at the same time, she was one of the main sponsors of a bill to make lynching a federal crime. Here's how she talked about the convergence of those issues. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) KAMALA HARRIS: Black lives have not been taken seriously as being fully human and deserving of dignity. And it should not require a maiming or torture in order for us to recognize a lynching when we see it and recognize it by federal law. SNELL: So those are major issues for her. And, you know, she has been criticized for her background as a tough-on-crime attorney general back in California. But supporters say her record in the Senate has really been focused on justice and due process. KELLY: Speaking of the background that propelled her to the Senate, among other past lives, she was a prosecutor. How she used that experience? SNELL: You know, it has given her a reputation as a person who will ask direct and pointed questions. I'm thinking about the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. She asked him to address specific abortion-related cases and whether or not they were correctly decided. She also got into a contentious exchange with him over his insistence that the investigation into allegations of his past sexual misconduct was a witch hunt. You know, that got a lot of national attention. And she - you know, her tough questioning really did frustrate President Trump, and it's something he's brought up repeatedly. He's called her treatment of Kavanaugh nasty, which is a term he has typically reserved for women. KELLY: So that is how the president says he sees her. What about how her colleagues in the Senate see her, Kelsey? As somebody who has walked those halls at Capitol Hill and watched a lot of Senate hearings, how is she perceived there? SNELL: You know, I've talked to a lot of her colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, and they say she's a very active member on the committees she works on. She does Intelligence and Judiciary and Homeland Security. People say she's the kind of member who does her homework, and she's a person who really wants to understand policy. They say she's tried to find bipartisan co-sponsors when she could, though we know that that is often difficult in Congress. They point to things like election security and maternal health. Though, I will say a major criticism that I've heard is that she doesn't have much of a track record of actually passing laws. Though, it is actually a tale of legislating in the Trump era writ large. It's hard to get legislation passed right now, and it hasn't really been the story of this Congress in general. So she works on some very sought-after committees, and it's given her a really big opportunity to be in the mix on issues like immigration that would be very important to the American story no matter who is president. KELLY: So pull it all together for us. What does her Senate career tell us about what kind of vice presidential candidate she's going to be? SNELL: Well, as we've said, we know she's not afraid of conflict and that she's direct and known for her follow-ups like we saw in primary debates where she was criticizing her running mate, Joe Biden, you know. And she's got a quick and ready response. I think a good example of her using that technique in the Senate was when she was questioning Attorney General William Barr. Here she is. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) HARRIS: Attorney General Barr, has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone? WILLIAM BARR: I wouldn't... HARRIS: Yes or no. BARR: Could you repeat that question? HARRIS: I will repeat it. SNELL: So you hear there her kind of catching him off guard and moving him into a place where he had to come up with a response. And she's not afraid to step in if someone appears to be filibustering or answering insufficiently. So I expect to see more of that when she debates Vice President Mike Pence in the fall. KELLY: Thank you, Kelsey. SNELL: Thank you. KELLY: Our congressional correspondent, Kelsey Snell. Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.