Finally the country sees us: Women of colour cheer Kamala Harris’s rise

To Krystina François, a Haitian American executive director of a Miami nonprofit organization, Kamala Harris is a lot like her, a first-generation daughter of immigrants pursuing the American dream.

To Nicole Sanchez, a Chicana consultant in Berkeley, California, Harris is an ambitious woman who listened to the same 1990s hip-hop as she did growing up.

And to Carol Kim, an Asian American union organizer in San Diego, Harris is the first woman on a national stage whom she can point to and say to her daughter, “She is one of us.”

In Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate and California senator, each of the women said they saw someone familiar. And as Harris, whose father immigrated from Jamaica and whose mother immigrated from India, reaches the highest echelons of American politics, dozens of women of color said they also view her success as their own.

“How could you not see this as a victory?” Afrah Hamin, 66, said of the announcement last week by Joe Biden that he had chosen Harris as his running mate.

“Finally,” continued Hamin, an Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sister of Harris’ from south Florida, “the country sees us, sees who we are, sees what we can do.”

In interviews with dozens of Black, Latina and Asian American women, many of them said Harris’ story was also their story. In Harris’ life, they recognized both her triumphs and the challenges that come with living in a country wrestling with its history of discrimination.

“It’s the twin devils of racism and sexism,” said Sanchez, 47, who lives blocks from the elementary school Harris attended. “We are told our whole lives to educate ourselves and work hard — God forbid it actually works, we get told we’re asking for too much.”

On Wednesday, Harris is scheduled to address a national audience during the virtual Democratic National Convention, and is all but certain to invoke her personal history and her barrier-breaking status as the first Black woman and the first Asian American woman on a major party’s presidential ticket.

It is a moment long overdue, many women said, even while acknowledging the historic run by Hillary Clinton four years ago.

With Harris, the women of color said they thought of their own childhoods and workplace struggles. Some recalled difficult experiences in boardrooms and courtrooms, in salary negotiations and in countless conversations about inequality.

Still, during Harris’ presidential primary bid last year, some of the most persistent doubts came from liberal voters, including Black and Latina women, who criticized her law enforcement record as a prosecutor and the impersonal way in which she has spoken about race.

Some of the women said they wanted her to confront her prosecutorial record directly in her speech Wednesday night and make clear what she might have done differently when she was California’s attorney general.

“Sometimes I feel like if she could just admit that she has done things that have hurt other Black people, and then talked about her race, it would feel more genuine,” said Alexandra Warren, 24, a lawyer in Boston.

“I don’t feel, honestly, a sense of representation because I know representation has never won a revolution,” Warren said. “Representation has never freed anybody from jail, representation has never ended structural inequalities, representation has never been able to fix structural violence.”

But even someone as liberal as Sanchez, who considers herself “to the left of the left,” was supportive of Harris and aware of all that she had overcome.

“You don’t get to enter those halls without compromise,” Sanchez said. “There’s always this line between ‘I am going to tell you the truth but in a way you can hear’ versus an activist standpoint. There is no way she is the vice president candidate without having made trade-offs.”

Many women also said they wanted to hear Harris speak candidly about her own experiences with race and racism. She has, at times, appeared to shy away from talking about what she eventually called the “donkey in the room,” the mostly whispered notion among Democratic voters that the country would not be willing to elect a woman who is both Black and Asian to the White House.

But much has changed: During the nationally televised convention this week, two other Black women referred to her as “sister.”

Still, many women recognize how difficult it is to speak about personal experiences.

“We’re expected to be perfect but not too perfect,” said Kacey Bonner, a 42-year-old communications consultant in Los Angeles whose parents grew up in the segregated South.

“We’re expected to stay in the box that others think we should be in, and anytime we stray from that we’re punished,” she continued. “You can say lots of things about Senator Harris, but she has refused to be in others’ boxes. And now we’re seeing both the benefits and cost of that.”

In the final weeks of Biden’s search for a running mate, some advisers warned him that Harris was too “ambitious.” Harris quickly took a term that was wielded as criticism and embraced it, encouraging young women of color to do the same.

“There will be a resistance to your ambition, there will be people who say to you, ‘You are out of your lane,’ ” Harris said July 31 during a livestream conversation for the virtual Black Girls Lead conference.

“They are burdened by only having the capacity to see what has always been instead of what can be,” she added. “But don’t you let that burden you.”

As demonstrations against systemic racism and police brutality continue, François, 31, said she hoped that Harris would acknowledge the impact of her prosecutorial record and pledge reforms to the criminal justice system in her speech Wednesday.

“Black folks, particularly younger Black folks, are at a point where we feel like respectability and the status quo are not enough,” François said. “We want our leaders to make Black lives a priority and to shift the systems that do not serve us and were not made for us.”

She said she also hoped to hear Harris begin making the case for the Democratic ticket — and not just the case against President Donald Trump — while also projecting her biracial identity as a strength.

“I want her to say, ‘I am Black. I am a woman. I am a Black woman. And I own it,’ ” François said.

Within a day of Harris’ joining the Biden ticket, her biracial heritage came under siege with name-calling and birtherism attacks from Trump and others in the Republican Party.

“I want to hold her accountable as a candidate,” François said, “but I also felt like I had to defend both her blackness and her humanity. She was being attacked on both sides.”

And some of the women braced themselves for the disappointment that would come with a Biden-Harris loss, just as they were disappointed four years ago.

“I really grew up believing the American dream, then I realized how ugly the underbelly was in 2016,” Kim said. “I am afraid that people are more racist and sexist than we realize and it will just break my heart.”