Washington: Black women across the US have lauded Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s historic announcement of picking Indian-origin Senator Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate.
Harris, the 55-year-old US Senator from California whose father is from Jamaica and mother an Indian, is the first Black woman to run on a major political party’s presidential ticket.
Harris’ name has been discussed as a top contender for vice president since before she even declared her own candidacy to run for the democratic nomination in January last year.
“I think what Joe Biden did today is he said ‘you are enough. You’ve got enough qualifications, you’ve got enough experience to help me restore this country to greatness,” said Minyon Moore, a Democratic operative who has been part of a public campaign to persuade Biden to pick a Black woman as his running mate.
Multiple black women told CNN that Harris’ selection was not just about herself, but providing a base for something for all women of colour across the US to aspire to.
“For every black woman, for every black child that has been hidden in America, or who has worked behind the same scenes. For every woman that is changing the bedpan, for every woman that is standing in a grocery store, Harris becomes the embodiment of that. She becomes the embodiment of Asian America, she becomes the embodiment of Indian Americans, she becomes the embodiment of a black woman,” Moore told CNN.
“Black women and women of color have long been underrepresented in elected office and in November we have an opportunity to change that,” Harris tweeted on Tuesday.
Harris was born in Oakland and grew up in Berkeley. After her parents divorced, she spent her high school years living in French-speaking Canada – her mother was teaching at McGill University in Montreal.
In 2010, she became the first Black woman to be elected as California’s Attorney General, overseeing the country’s second largest Justice Department, only behind the US Department of Justice.
