Is it a matter of assumptions?
14th October 2019 · 0 Comments
This is not an endorsement by any means. Let’s call it curiosity.
U.S. Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) hit the ground running. She formally announced her bid for the president of the United States on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday on ABC’s Good Morning America last January. The following week, she rallied twenty-thousand plus voters in her Oakland, Calif. hometown, and was well-received at her alma mater, Howard University. Harris scored big in the first Democratic debates on June 26, 2019 and June 27, 2019. She showed strength, courage, intellect and the ability to take it to Democratic front-runner and former VP Joseph R. Biden Jr. On July 2, three polls of likely Democratic voters — two were national surveys, and one polled Iowa caucus-goers — all showed Harris in second place within four days of the first round of debates. Quinnipiac University’s poll showed Biden with a 22 percent support among respondents and Harris with 20 percent support.
Fast forward to October 2019 and recent polls are showing Harris in a fourth-place tie with South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, behind Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has a fractional lead against Biden, followed by Senator Bernie Sanders. A Los Angeles Times article attributes her slide in the polls to “problems that have plagued Harris nationwide: uneven debate performances, a shifting stance on issues and, perhaps above all, the lack of a clear and compelling message.”
There may be some plausibility to that argument. Fewer televised interviews and the lack of a national ad campaign and widely distributed articles on her positions have had the effect of suppressing Harris’ platform. But there is also a rhetorical question hanging in the air and over Harris’ head that has also caused attention to be diverted from her presidential goals. Articles and interviews questioning “Is Kamala Harris Black Enough,” have dominated coverage of her campaign. Clearly, Donald Trump Jr.’s “new birtherism” strategy to knock Harris out of contention, sparked the inane, ridiculous conversation.
We saw it when Barack Obama ran and Donald Trump Sr.’s continuation of his birtherism claims that Obama wasn’t a true African American. In that case, Trump lied. During the first debate, Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a racist, right-wing hack’s tweet about Harris, a new birtherism claim that is, once again, a blatant lie. According to news reports, Trump Jr., shared this tweet from Ali Alexander: “Kamala Harris is implying she is descended from American Black Slaves. She’s not. She comes from Jamaican Slave Owners. That’s fine. She’s not an American Black. Period.” By the end of the night, Trump had deleted his message, and by Friday, a spokesman said it had all been a misunderstanding.
“I am a proud daughter of Oakland, California,” Harris said in January, when she formally announced her candidacy at Howard University. “I was born Black and I will die Black,” she later told a radio interviewer. Harris is the daughter of Jamaican native and naturalized U.S. citizen, Donald Harris, 81, a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University. Her mother, the late Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a scientist and college professor. She was born in India. Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California.
Anyone who knows the history of the African Diaspora, knows that the intrinsic genealogy of both Jamaican and Indians is primarily African. So, the idea that Kamala Harris is not an African American is ludicrous at best and fakery at the very least. Furthermore, her choice to attend a historically Black university, Howard University, when she could have matriculated at any university of her choice, speaks to her self-identification as a Black American. She earned her law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
Then, there were the critics who said Harris wasn’t Black enough to represent Black Americans because she contributed to high rates of incarceration, while she served as a prosecutor in California.
However, what is not being discussed is the five-ton elephant in the living room. We experienced it during Obama’s run. While it’s true that Black voters are not a monolith, reports that older Black Americans are backing Biden and younger Blacks are backing Sanders, begs the question: Can a Black person, especially a Black woman, win the presidency ever again? Will Black voters wait to see, as they did with Obama, if whites in Iowa will validate a Black candidate, before voting for a Black candidate?
What is also true about Black voters is that they are cautious with their votes and they want to vote for someone who can successfully triumph over Trump. With the racial hateration Trump has injected into the American mainstream, do Black voters even dare to hope that Harris, Booker, or any other non-white candidate can win in 2020?
These specious arguments aside, here are some things about Harris that voters should know but may never know, due to a lack of media exposure:
As U.S. Senator, Kamala introduced or co-sponsored legislation to provide sweeping tax cuts for the middle class; address the high cost of rent; raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour; make higher education tuition-free for the vast majority of Americans; reform the cash bail system; protect the legal rights of refugees and immigrants; and expand access to affordable, quality health care with Medicare for All. In the Senate, Harris fought to pass her HBCU Historic Preservation Reauthorization Bill to rebuild HBCU campus infrastructure.
As California’s Attorney General, Harris prosecuted transnational gangs that exploited women and children and trafficked in guns and drugs. She led comprehensive studies and investigations into the impacts of transnational criminal organizations and human trafficking and fought Wall Street banks and won $20 billion for homeowners who were facing foreclosure during the Great Recession. She helped thousands of families stay in their homes and helped to pass one of the nation’s strongest anti-foreclosure laws. Harris also lead the team that helped bring down California’s Proposition 8 at the U.S. Supreme Court and to fight for marriage equality nationwide.
Harris sued predatory for-profit colleges that scammed students and veterans and fought to require for-profit companies to provide their employees with health insurance that covers contraceptives and protect patients’ access to reproductive health clinics. Harris also established California’s Bureau of Children’s Justice and fought to reduce elementary school truancy.
Throughout her career, Harris has advocated for criminal justice reforms. She established the first Office of Recidivism Reduction and Reentry and pioneered the nation’s first open data initiative to expose racial disparities in the criminal justice system. She created the “Back on Track” program which connected first-time felons with job training and apprenticeships.
Harris served two terms as District Attorney of San Francisco. Defeating a two-term incumbent, she was first elected in 2003, and was overwhelmingly re-elected to a second term in November 2007. She began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, where she specialized in prosecuting child sexual assault cases. In 1998, she joined the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, where she led the Career Criminal Unit. She also served as the head of the San Francisco City Attorney’s Division on Children and Families.
Harris’ presidential to-do list includes a broad range of issues. She recently rolled out ambitious plans for paid family leave, childcare, and lower prescription drug prices that some consider far to the left. In addition to caring for new children, the proposal would allow workers take leave for personal or family medical issues, and related situations. For example, a parent could take leave to care for a child harmed by domestic violence; workers could take leave to care for domestic partners, parents-in-law and “chosen family,” among others. Paid leave would be available to “self-employed workers” and independent contractors.
Harris will push for passage of the Child Care for Working Families Act to cap the percentage of income that low- and middle-income families spend on child care and the creation of a federal inter-agency working group tasked with cutting child poverty by 50 percent in her first term, in addition to expanding food stamps and tax credits for families with children.
Harris’s plans also include: criminal justice reform (ending mass incarceration); the economy (higher wages, tax cuts for the middle class); education (teacher pay gap & student debt); energy and environmental issues; foreign policy (domestic terrorism, Paris Accord, allies, diplomacy); America’s infrastructure; veteran’s healthcare; transgender rights; gun regulation (universal background checks, assault weapons ban, etc.); healthcare (Medicare for All with choice between private and public Medicare plans); immigration (reinstate DACA; restore and expand Temporary Protection Status); Impeachment (“I’ve literally been carrying around a list of Donald Trump’s impeachable offenses… Congress should stand up for the integrity of our democracy in this process and hold Donald Trump accountable.”); trade; and racial justice (economic justice, investment in higher education and primary education, teacher pay raise, and protecting voting rights and U.S. elections).
Harris vows that working to repair the systemic inequalities people of color face in this country will remain a top priority for her as president. According to her website, Harris believes racial justice is unachievable unless there is economic justice. Harris’ LIFT Act – the largest tax cut for working Americans will provide economic relief to one in two Americans, including 60 percent of Black families. Harris’ Rent Relief Act will provide families relief in the face of rising rents.
If elected, Harris will build a pipeline of teachers of color and inject billions of federal dollars into schools serving students of color. As president, she’ll make attendance debt-free for students and make a multi-billion investment in programs that teach students of color.
Harris said recently, “…Trump is not trying to make America great; he’s trying to make America hate.” As president, Harris vows to speak out about the rise of white supremacist violence that has targeted Black churches, synagogues and immigrant communities.
Harris is married to Doug Emhoff and is Ella and Cole Emhoff’s stepmother. She is the author of “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey and Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.”
The fifth Democratic presidential primary debate will air on MSNBC and be co-hosted by The Washington Post on Nov. 20.
Read more at https://kamalaharris.org/issue/fighting-for-racial-justice/#SHDxQaT72H37bQlx.99
This article originally published in the October 14, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
