The New Yorker: Kamala Harris Makes History

Saturday night, in the centennial year of women winning the right to vote, Kamala Harris took the stage in Wilmington, Delaware, as the Vice-President-elect. The first woman—does it need to be said?—to be elected to the White House, she was wearing a sleek pants suit, suffragette white. Pearl earrings. A radiant smile. She was there as the first welcome harbinger of the post-Trump era, the return to sanity, the sensible resolution to a years-long mad-king play. But Harris had a message that was greater even than this remarkable moment. “I am thinking about . . . the generations of women, Black women,” she said, pausing while the crowd whooped. “Asian, white, Latina, Native American women, who throughout our nation’s history have paved the way for this moment tonight. Women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all—including the Black women who are often, too often, overlooked, but so often prove they are the backbone of our democracy.” She went on to praise President-elect Joe Biden, who, she said, “had the audacity to break one of the most substantial barriers that exists in our country and select a woman as his Vice-President.”

History was made. The memes and TikToks flew: Harris striding, in heels; Harris descending onto the tarmac; Harris as Wonder Woman. One mom-spirational slogan in particular unleashed a stream of heart-eye emojis in group texts throughout the land: “Make sure to wear shoes, ladies. There’s glass everywhere.” Julia Louis-Dreyfus tweeted, “ ‘Madam Vice President’ is no longer a fictional character.”

So: exit the fembots of Trump’s White House, with their long blond blowouts, cloned from an atom of Ivanka’s tinted contact lens. Enter Harris, the woman from San Francisco’s East Bay, who campaigned in Converse, who dances along to Cardi B. In her speech, she invoked her late mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a cancer researcher who came to California from Southern India at the age of nineteen, calling her “the woman most responsible for my presence here today.” (Her father, Donald Harris, who was born in Jamaica, is an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford; he and Shyamala divorced when Kamala was young, and she was primarily raised by her mother.) Joining Harris on the stage were her husband, Doug Emhoff, whom she married in 2014, and his two children from a previous marriage; her sister Maya; her niece, Meena, whom she helped to raise; and Meena’s young children. In 2019, when I was writing about Harris for a Profile in the magazine, Meena told me that, growing up, “it was me, my grandma, my mom, and my aunt. I often joke that the opening scene of ‘Wonder Woman’ the movie was what it was like to grow up in my house. It was female-centric, strong female-centric, with a huge emphasis on social justice and public service early on.”

Harris is fifty-six, a political meteor. Less than twenty years ago, she won her first election, as district attorney of San Francisco. She was the first woman and the first person of color to occupy that role. In 2010, she became the first woman and the first person of color to be elected attorney general in California. In 2016, she was elected to the United States Senate—the second Black woman and the first South Asian woman to serve. “People told her before she became A.G., ‘There’s no way you’re going to win this race, they’re not ready for a woman,’ ” Debbie Mesloh, a close friend and former adviser, told me recently. “She’s always had such hard elections, and such easy reëlections.” In 2019, Harris told me, “I’ve always been involved with breaking barriers. And breaking barriers can be a painful process. I’m never going to complain about it, ’cause it’s worth it in the end, it’s worth it in terms of what you can accomplish.”

Four years ago, on the night of her Senate election, Harris wrote a victory speech that presumed a Hillary Clinton win. She thought that she would be a soldier for the first female President of the United States. Mesloh, who has been with Harris on every Election Night but this year’s, says that, as the returns rolled in, Harris was in shock. “She didn’t believe it at first,” Mesloh told me. “Obviously, it started to become more and more clear that Trump was going to win. She was so distraught.” According to Mesloh, the celebration party turned mournful. “First, she gathered the staff. People were crying. She decided to roll up her sleeves.” In her memoir, Harris writes that she tore up her speech and wrote a new one, focussed on the task ahead. “Do we retreat or do we fight?” she asked then. “I say we fight. And I intend to fight!” A former prosecutor, she was a heavyweight on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, and a formidable adversary to Trump’s proxies. After just two years in the Senate, she announced that she was running for President.

As a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Harris was, memorably, Biden’s adversary, and she bristled when people suggested that she would be good for the role she now occupies, that it might not be “her time” to be President. But Biden has implied that he might be a one-term President by choice, someone who will draw upon his decades-long relationships on Capitol Hill in an attempt to unify and heal a divided country, and then pass the baton. His selection of Harris as his Veep was tantamount to an anointment—she is going to be the Democratic Party. Mesloh said, “She’s going to bring a real solid sense of serious ideas around criminal-justice reform. Racial justice. Bread-and-butter economic issues. No one’s ever sat in those rooms with that type of authority she has—biracial, a woman, raised by two immigrants, raised by a single mom.”

If Harris runs for President again in four years, it’ll be almost as an incumbent. Her time, in many senses, begins now. Surely, her responsibilities do: even now, Biden and Harris are assembling a coronavirus-response task force, showing more leadership while in the wings than the sitting President and his V.P. have demonstrated. And, because she is making history, her time will never end. On Saturday, Harris concluded her remarks with a promise. “While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” she said. “Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”

Dana Goodyear is a staff writer at The New Yorker.