PREVIEW: The Truths We Hold: An American Journey
The depth of Kamala Harris – a primer for the Sep 7th Trump debate
Kamala Harris launched her autobiography a few months before her presidential campaign, in January 2019. During the campaign she ran out of funds and withdrew her candidacy – but in the process, she has left us with a bestselling book that reveals the core of the person who The Prophet (Lichtman) forecasts will be the next president of the United States.
She will be President Number 47.
Representing people has never been a problem for Harris. When she was Senator, she represented 39 million Californians -- a population larger than 80% of the countries in the world. While she was Senator, she saw the Trump administration align itself with white supremacists at home and cozy up to dictators abroad, rip babies from their mothers’ arms, give corporations and the wealthy huge tax cuts, derail the fight against climate change, sabotage health care and imperil a woman’s right to control her own body - all while lashing out at seemingly everything and everyone, including the very idea of a free and independent press.
She had many inspirations in her life, and one of her spinal teachers was Thurgood Marshall, who gave a speech that resonates with her today: “We cannot play ostrich. Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work…We must dissent from indifference..from the apathy…from the fear, the hatred, and the mistrust.” Her book grows out of that call to action.
The condition she describes is one where we are asking people to do more with less money and to live longer with less security. Wages haven’t risen in forty years, even as the costs of health care, tuition, and housing have soared. The middle class is living paycheck to paycheck.
Her first job was in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. A character-setting moment was a case involving a drug bust. The police had arrested a number of individuals in the raid, including an innocent bystander: a woman who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time. When she got the case tt was late on a Friday afternoon, and most people had gone home for the weekend. In all likelihood, a judge wouldn’t see her until Monday. That meant she’d have to spend the weekend in jail.
Harris immediately asked herself: Does she work weekends ? Is she going to have to explain to her employer? I knew she had young children at home. Do they know she’s in jail? They must think she did something wrong. Who’s taking care of them right now? Is there even someone who can? Child Protective Services might get called. My God, thought Harris, she could lose her kids. Everything was on the line for this woman.
Harris rushed to the clerk of the court and asked to have the case called that very day. She begged. She pleaded: ‘If the judge could just return to the bench for five minutes, we could get her released.’ All Harris could think about was her family and her frightened children.
The judge returned. Harris watched and listened as he reviewed the case, waiting for him to give the order. Then, with the pound of a gavel, just like that, she was free.
Harris notes that “I never did get the chance to meet her, but I’ll never forget her.” It crystallized how, even on the margins of the criminal justice system, the stakes are extraordinarily high and intensely human. “It was revelatory, a moment that proved how much it mattered to have compassionate people working as prosecutors.”
She came from a compassionate family. Her father, Donald Harris, was born in Jamaica in 1938. He was a brilliant student who immigrated to the United States after being admitted to the University of California at Berkeley. He went there to study economics and would go on to teach economics at Stanford.
Her mother’s life began thousands of miles to the east, in southern India. Shyamala Gopalan was the oldest of four children, and a gifted student. She showed a passion for science, her parents encouraged and supported her, and she graduated from the University of Delhi at nineteen.
Her mother learned that it was service to others that gave life purpose and meaning. Social justice was a central part of family discussions. Once when she was fussing as a toddler, her mother tried to sooth her by asking “What do you want?“ “Fweedom!” yelled back the young Kamala.
She was raised in a close-knit neighborhood of working families in Berkley, CA. One of her favorite locations was a community centre called Rainbow Sign. Rainbow Sign was a performance space, cinema, art gallery, dance studio, and more. By day, you could take classes in dance and foreign languages, or workshops in theater and art. It was where she learned that artistic expression, ambition, and intelligence were good ways to feed the brain, bringing together food, poetry, politics, music, dance, and art.
She continued her education at Thurgood Marshall’s alma mater, Howard University – a place where you could become the person you aspired to be. In the summer of her sophomore year, she got an internship with Senator Alan Cranston of California; she would be elected to his Senate seat 30 years later…
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