Elizabeth Stark:

One of my students told me tonight that her grandmother’s name was Kamala. “My little diabetic, illiterate grandmother who is no longer with us would NEVER HAVE IMAGINED that she might be vice-pres of the U.S.!!!!!!” she wrote into the chat. These are heady times. I know that I was not sure I was too excited about Kamala before the choice was announced–I was more excited about Abrams and intrigued by Karen Bass. I desperately wanted Biden to choose a woman of color. Polls suggested that people didn’t care much about that. Really? Who? But I also wished Warren were on the ticket already…

At the same time, when the news came to me by text, I felt overwhelmed with emotion that cast me back to my adolescence, when Geraldine Ferraro ran for Vice President as the first woman VP candidate on a major party ticket. Oh, how I wanted her to win. I happen to be listening to the novel Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld, which imagines a Hillary who didn’t marry Bill Clinton. (Apparently she turned him down twice before agreeing to marry him in real life.) It’s a book that is very much about the humiliations and injustices suffered by women in politics, about the absurdity of being a county who has never had a woman president. In these times of Pandemic, it’s become clear that countries with women leaders have, generally speaking, been better served. I read a letter to the editor somewhere that suggested that people in countries that elect women are probably more rational and educated, more open to science. I am not replicating the argument well, but it stuck with me. It’s not the women themselves per se, though many are remarkable, brilliant leaders, but the intelligence of a population that doesn’t vote by gender.

I was thrilled to read that Harris has been marching in the Black Lives Matter protests. I want this ticket of two candidates who were never my top pick to win more than I want almost anything right now, because I think it’s the first step in a hundred urgent steps that we will be hard pressed to take without them, even if they do not yet fully understand what must be done.

Finally, I’ll say that Kamala Harris stood up to Biden, chastised him for praising segregationist senators, in one of the debates. The fact that Biden, who is on record as wanting someone he is on the same page with, someone like-minded, sees that a meaningful ally is one who calls you out when you are wrong, as much as she’ll support you when you are right–this is what gives me hope. He’s the wedge, opening the door to new leaders; he is the Trojan Horse, sneaking in–I very much hope–Warren and Ocasio-Cortez and others who have the vision to get us to the future where I want my kids–and your kids–to live.

Aya de Leon: I think it’s a big deal to have a woman of color on the ticket, especially as Biden would likely be a one-term president. It’s a big deal to set up a Black woman as the likely successor if he wins in November. That said, I am not Harris’ biggest fan.

Since Biden said he would pick a woman, many of us wanted a woman of color. I preferred Stacey Abrams and Karen Bass. And in a wider pool with white women, Elizabeth Warren was one of my favorites.

I don’t like Harris’ track record as a prosecutor, especially in light of the Uprising for Black Lives. She has been on the wrong side of the movement to defund police and abolish prisons. As a woman, she touts her record of fighting for survivors of sexual violence, but those solutions are not in line with my own anti-carceral feminist politics. I favor restorative justice.

I thought it would be powerful to have a VP candidate who was more movement-friendly. Or at least didn’t have activists in the Black community who really disliked her and vowed never to vote for her. I liked how Abrams would balance the ticket in the South, in states that would be harder for Biden to win. Harris does have big advantages in bringing older and more mainstream Black voters to the table while still being more palatable to white voters. Overall, she’s a lot like Obama–the very act of nominating her or having her win is radical, but her own politics are deceptively moderate.

But in the big picture, it is really about getting everyone on board to defeat Tr*mp. Angela Davis, Noam Chomsky and other old school radicals are pushing for Biden, and hopefully younger folks will get on board. Biden is on coming around for big parts of the Green New Deal, and that’s good. I pray that they win, and will fight to see them make it to the White House.

Vijaya Nagarajan:

To understand the boldness of Kamala Harris, one needs to see the boldness of her mother, Shymala Gopalan, more clearly. Kamala’s mother came to the United States to study the sciences from the city of Chennai, then Madras, in the state of Tamil Nadu, in southern India, the same state I, too, was born in. 

Kamala means lotus in Sanskrit, and the third syllable is elongated with its vowel lengthening, the mouth open, the sound coming out like music, like a lengthened note the bow makes on a violin string or a hand flickering on a sitar, the note extending by an extra beat.  

Kamala Harris’s mother, Shymala Gopalan, came to the United States by herself to study the sciences in Berkeley in the early 60s. This was extremely unusual in Tamil culture. At that time, there were very few Indians in Berkeley or even in California, or even in the entire United States at that time. To come that far as a Tamil woman of her generation was a defiant act. To study the sciences, to fall in love with a fellow Jamaican Ph.D. student, to marry him were all very defiant acts. To divorce him when Kamala was seven years old, in 1972, was even more of an extraordinarily defiant act. A Tamil woman who could do all that is stunning. 

Kamala talks about her Tamil grandparents coming often to visit them in Berkeley and she going to Chennai to walk with her grandfather and his political buddies along the beach road. Her grandfather was a kind of secretary of state in the Indian government. Politics and sciences run in the blood of her Tamil family. 

[See https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/11/politics/harris-indian-roots/index.html for a fascinating interview on her Indian roots]

She states in this interview, referring to not stating a hierarchical difference between the different parts of herself, both the African-American and the Tamil-American:  “It is important to not say one thing to the exclusion of the other, because I don’t feel the need to do that. They are of equal weight in terms of who I am and the impact that they had on me growing up.” It is a great combination for what we need to do over the next years ahead. We need to marry politics and sciences to deal with the Coronavirus, to deal with climate chaos.  Her own birth due to a marriage between two worlds bode well for us as she combines at a cellular level: race, culture, language, law, politics, immigration, sciences, economics. 

Of course, there are some who dislike her intensely, and many who think her prosecutor life makes her ineligible to be on the Biden ticket. I can understand why they think that way. Though I was excited about her candidacy when she first began, I found Elizabeth Warren much more exciting in her concrete proposals to solve country-wide problems. And there were others who were in the potential stream who were much more radical, to the left of center, Abrams, Bass. I can understand some of their political disappointments. 

Yet, there is something that Kamala intrinsically possesses that makes me lean towards her at this moment. I am excited about her ability to argue fiercely with both Biden and with Trump’s policies. I think we need real boldness and fierceness now; I think we need a woman––– who has no trouble getting into a fighting stance when needed; a black woman, an Asian-American woman, a daughter of double immigrants, a lawyer who comprehends what the rule of law actually is, what democracy is, and someone who intimately knows what living in multiple worlds entails. 

And, I think, we need to stay out in the “streets” to show what the will of the people might look like to her and anyone else for that matter. 

She is often referred to as the female “Obama”; this will be her strength and her weakness. I fell in love with Obama so much, as so many of us did in 2008.  Since I was sixteen, when I became eligible for becoming a US citizen, I had been able to resist the temptation to become a US citizen. For the first time in thirty-two years, I could no longer resist and I became a US citizen.  I was finally willing to give up my Indian citizenship at the age of forty-eight because of Obama. He was on the edge of so much hope and change.  Yet, he succumbed to the expertise of the Clintons and fell in with the economic elites to do their bidding.  He seemed to not have the courage to forge his own path, to be the change that he promised to be. Kamala needs to rise above these weaknesses of Obama. She needs to think outside the box in terms of traditional economics. 

She needs to remember the deep asceticism of her Hindu roots, to not get succumbed by the glamour of the ticket, of the position, of the sway of the rich and powerful; do not ever be grateful just to be invited to sit with the elites. Argue with them; make sure the spoils of the rich are distributed across the society. Be ready to persuade with all the skills she has to lessen inequality, not increase them. 

She needs to remember that she is a servant of the people, as her Tamil grandfather did. She needs to think of the whole arc of justice framework, to understand the ways in which brutality functions along with the state; how the police and the law incessantly work against people of color, and be willing to stand against them, when necessary and as often as necessary. Good luck, Kamala. We stand by you, but remember what you need to do––fight for climate, fight for black lives matter, fight for the long arc of justice.