Kamala Harris: The Prosecutor
By Megan Wallin
An American Dream
She carries herself like a leader. She doesn’t isolate listeners with simplistic statements when she speaks. Her back story is proof of the American dream. An ethusiastic 20,000 supporters came out in Oakland, Ca to hear her announce her intention to make a run for the presidency. That, and according to Lisa Lerer of The New York Times, Harris “matched Senator Bernie Sanders’s record by raising $1.5 million from 38,000 donors in the first 24 hours of her campaign”. All in all an impressive campaign roll out. Kamala Harris’ decision to run for president is an obvious threat to other Democratic candidates.
Prepared to Change the Status Quo
As a prosecutor Harris went to crime scenes
In an interview with Mother Jones writer Jamilah King, Kamala Harris gives more of her story, her views, and how her education and work has prepared her to change the status quo. She tells King, “This is about my training as a prosecutor. I like to go to the scene, and I do that with almost [any] project. I need to see it and I need to hear it—I need to feel it, almost, so that I can have some intuitive sense, as well as some theoretical or intellectual or academic sense, of what’s going on.”
Something Meaningful
At first glance, Kamala Harris’ background as a prosecutor doesn’t seem like the type of preparation that would lead to being not just a senator, but a social leader, maker of history, and presidential candidate. But Harris grew up watching her parents forge ahead into unknown territory, and—by her own admission—her yearning for something meaningful started at a young age.
Education and Activism
Harris’s mother Gopalan immigrated from Chennai, India, to study at the University of California-Berkeley for her doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology. She met and fell in love with Donald Harris, a Jamaican-born economics major earning his Ph.D. Rather than returning home to marry someone of her family’s choosing, Gopalan stayed in the United States. Together Harris and Gopalan had two daughters. They raised their daughters nurtured within two combined cultures and instilled them with a respect for activism and academia.
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