Kamala Harris: Who is the woman who wants to take on Trump?

It has been nearly 50 years since Brooklyn-born Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman in Congress, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, and nearly 40 years since Geraldine Ferraro, a popular Congresswoman from Queens, was chosen by Jimmy Carter’s former vice-president, Walter Mondale, to run alongside him on the Democratic presidential ticket.

Twelve years ago, John McCain plucked the former beauty contest winner and Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, to run with him on the Republican ticket, and it seems only yesterday that probably the most experienced politician to ever run for the office of President, Hillary Clinton, was unable to shatter the glass ceiling at her campaign headquarters in Manhattan’s Javits Center on election night, November 8, 2016, when she was defeated by the Republican outlier, New York real estate developer and reality television star, Donald Trump.

All these accomplished women valiantly tried to attain the highest elected political positions in the US but they all failed until Kamala Devi Harris, the former San Francisco district attorney, California Attorney-General and senator, was sworn in on January 20, 2021 as the first African-American, Southeast-Asian and female vice-president of the United States.

What is it about Harris that allowed her to succeed where so many of her accomplished forbears failed? Now that she is the first in the order of succession to take the place of President Joe Biden, who, at 78, is the oldest man to ever attain that office, how will she influence his leadership and affect national policy as he attempts to heal a nation ravaged by Covid and traumatised by raging political divisions and the provocations of Trump?

This is the question Dan Morain, a veteran reporter who has covered the California judicial and political beats for over 40 years, attempts to answer in Kamala’s Way, which is neither a salacious exposé nor an obsequious hagiography - but a fascinating account of Harris’ path to the pinnacle of American politics.

Kamala’s Way is a California story, meaning it could only have happened in California, Morain tells the Listener. With its population of 40 million and shifting demographics (currently 63% of the state’s population is non-white,) it was the Golden State’s political and demographic diversity that attracted Harris’ immigrant parents to study at University of California, Berkeley, during the height of the civil-rights era and the growing free-speech movement.

In 1958, aged 19, Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, graduated from a small New Delhi University with a bachelor’s in home science and traveled to Berkeley to study for a PhD in nutrition and endocrinology. In the autumn of 1962, she attended a gathering of black students where the featured speaker was Jamaican-born Donald Jasper Harris, who was studying for his PhD in economics. She charmed him, and they married in 1963. Kamala Devi was born in 1964 and her younger sister, Maya Lakshmi, in 1966. Shyamala has said that she gave her daughters names from Indian mythology because “a culture that worships goddesses produces strong women”.

In the mid-to-late 60s, Shyamala and Donald Harris were active in the civil rights movement. Their daughters “got a stroller’s eye view of people getting into what the civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis called “good trouble”. Though Shyamala imported her Indian heritage to her daughters and even flew them across the world to meet their grandparents, she was also aware that she was raising two black girls in the US, and so took them to Thursday evening gatherings at Rainbow Sign, a black cultural centre in Berkeley whose guests included the poet Maya Angelou, Shirley Chisholm and the musician and civil rights icon, Nina Simone.

After earning his PhD in 1966, Harris, a non-conformist economic thinker with left-wing leanings, took positions wherever they were offered, first at the University of Champagne-Urbana in Illinois then at the University of Wisconsin, where he was given a tenured professorship. Shyamala remained with their girls in the Bay Area. To be closer to his family, Harris accepted a post at Stanford and his popularity with students was such that he became the first tenured African-American economics professor at this home of the conservative Hoover Institution.