Kamala Harris nomination caps historic week for women with big dreams: Donna Brazile
When Harris accepted her VP nomination, to me she was in a room crowded with all who came before, from her mother to Thurgood Marshall and Rosa Parks.
What a moment, what a historic week to witness and participate as an at-large delegate for the first virtual unconventional national convention. When California’s Sen. Kamala Harris stood before the country to accept her party’s nomination for vice president of the United States, we all saw “herstory” being made. Yes, we have had women vice presidential candidates from both major political parties, but never a woman of color, never a woman who is a first generation American.
Before Harris' speech accepting the party’s nomination, the moment was so surreal, especially for a convention veteran like me. Where was the crowd, the music, the noise coming from the rafters?
Yet Democrats are finding ways to bring the noise from the outside, a joyful noise coming from every corner of the nation — from those who marched for liberty and equality to the dignity of those who demanded a seat at the table. This week, Democrats found ways to call the roll by asking every American if they are ready to serve. This time to save our democracy.
A week for women with big dreams
We fight the battles for equality again and again, never knowing when we will see signs of progress. In 2008 and again in 2012 we saw a tangible result. And on this August night of 2020, with a country torn apart by its differences, an economy on life support and families ravaged by the unrelenting virus, we had another one.
This week — the week we celebrated the centennial of women’s suffrage — was a week for women, and for little dark-skinned girls with big dreams, for the children of immigrants and, for all of us, a fulfillment of the very promise of America itself. We owe so much of this moment to Joe Biden, who made the wise decision to choose Harris as his running mate.
Kamala comes from the kind of strong stuff that America is made of. Her mother, Shyamala Goplan, graduated from college in India when she was just 19. Her drive to make the world better, to offer her best to the world, led her to apply to study at the University of California-Berkeley, and she was accepted. Imagine being a sheltered girl of 19 arriving in Berkeley alone in 1964, in the middle of the civil rights movement. There she met and married Donald Harris, who had come to Berkeley from Jamaica with similar ambitions.
Their children, Kamala and Maya, attended demonstrations while still in their strollers. In Kamala’s memoir, "The Truths We Hold," she told the story of fussing in the stroller during one of these demonstrations and her mother leaning down to ask her, “What do you want?” Little Kamala replied, “Fweedom.”
It’s no exaggeration to say that Kamala’s passion for this country and her work to protect the rights and freedoms of the voiceless is something she learned in the cradle. Her parents divorced when she was a young child, and she watched her single mom fight for dignity and respect as one of very few female scientists.
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Even with such accomplished and hardworking parents, no one gave Kamala a staircase to climb, led her to the elevator to go up or guided her hand to the first rung of the ladder to the place where she could achieve her dreams. She had to have ambition. Based on her background, to find her place in society, she also had to be further grounded in who she is.
Growing her wings at Howard
I’ve always respected that when it came time for college, Kamala picked Howard University, the Harvard of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. She’d grown up in mostly white Berkeley and moved to Montreal when her mother got a teaching job in Canada. Choosing Howard, Kamala was choosing to know her Black heritage better. I teach at Howard, and every time I walk on that campus, I feel the energy that comes up from the soil there, an energy that says all things are possible. It is a place to grow your wings, and Kamala did. As she wrote in her memoir, “At Howard, you could come as you were and leave as the person you aspired to be." She left Howard on the lift of those wings.
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Now Kamala says her heroes at Howard were lawyers. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall attended Howard, as did Charles Hamilton Houston, the founder of Howard’s law school who fought the doctrine of “separate but equal” his whole life. When she spoke Wednesday night, she may have seemed alone, but she was, to my mind, in a very crowded room. I saw Thurgood Marshall standing behind her, and Charles Hamilton Houston as well. I saw voting rights activist and organizer Fannie Lou Hamer there, and Rosa Parks, Barbara Jordan, and Shirley Chisholm, who seemed just about as proud as Kamala’s Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters. There, standing right over her shoulder was her mama Shyamala.
What Kamala saw by watching her mother Shyamala was something that was so profound, Kamala still remembered it when she was writing her memoir. Shyamala told her daughters that science lets you “see what can be, unburdened by what has been.”
The country is in a terrible mess, and the solutions to fix our mountain of problems are likely to come from unexpected places. Kamala Harris, the pride of the immigrant and Black communities, who has worked her whole life to make a world that is free, fair and equal, will partner with Joe Biden to shake off the burdens of what has been.
So America, we can sit and wait for others to make history or we can use this moment, as the Democrats did, to shape a new herstory — one we can shape together.
Donna Brazile is the endowed chair of the Gwendolyn and Colbert King public policy lecture series at Howard University and Adjunct Faculty member in the Women and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, a Fox News contributor, an at-large automatic delegate to the 2020 Democratic convention, and former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee. She is the author of "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House." Follow her on Twitter: @donnabrazile
