Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks first in every important speech about one woman: her late mother, a pioneering scientist who came to the United States from India.
The anecdotes not only serve to illustrate her life story — they help the vice president, who has not made his identity the central theme of his White House race, to talk about feminism and racism.
“My mother was a brilliant, five-foot-tall, brown woman. And as the oldest child, I saw how the world treated her sometimes,” Harris said at the Democratic National Convention in August.
In her first speech as the party’s official presidential nominee, Harris detailed the journey of Shyamala Gopalan, who left her homeland at the age of 19 to pursue a master’s degree in California.
Gopalan went on to become a leading breast cancer researcher, contributing to the development of several treatments for the disease.
In Washington this week, when Harris spoke before thousands of supporters in the center of the US capital, the person she mentioned most, after her Republican rival Donald Trump, was her mother.
The vice president talks about her mother’s American experience as a black woman – a concept she rarely discusses as it relates to her own life.
Harris never mentioned the fact that if elected she would become the first female US president, as well as the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to hold the Oval Office.
Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey, says not mentioning these potentially historic milestones is a deliberate choice by Harris.
“They have to convince people that they need to be ‘convinced’ that a woman can do this job and be strong and tough,” Walsh told AFP.
But “there’s racism, there’s sexism,” the researcher says. “She’s all there, and she can’t act like she doesn’t exist,” so talking about her mom “is a way for her to acknowledge it, but it’s not as focused on her. “
‘For a long time’
Gopalan met Jamaican immigrant Donald Harris in the early 1960s at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had come to study economics.
They found each other right in the heat of the civil rights movement and Kamala Harris – born in 1964 – was brought to the march in a stroller.
After her parents divorced when she was five, Harris and her sister Maya were raised primarily by their mother.
Harris said, “He taught us never to complain about injustice, but to do something about it.”
The early, busy days of his campaign, which began in July after President Joe Biden left office, were marked by an unexpected symbol, taken from one of Gopalan’s favorite expressions – a coconut. Was.
But Harris has since used stories from her childhood to make a more personal connection with voters, and has emphasized how she wants to work for middle-class families in a way that reflects her own upbringing.
Harris often talks about how her mother “worked long hours”, and then would stay up late at night drinking tea with “a stack of bills in front of her”. Gopalan kept a strict budget and focused on saving for a home first, Harris says.
The Vice President also talked about taking care of his ailing mother, preparing meals and choosing clothes that would not irritate his skin. Gopalan died in 2009 after a battle with colon cancer.
single mother
With women’s rights at the center of the White House battle, Harris has put her mother — a woman who married out of love in India in an “act of self-determination” rather than face an arranged marriage — front and center. Kept in.
The vice president, who helped raise her husband’s two children from a previous marriage, speaks little about her father, who is in his 80s and lives in Washington.
Trump has called Donald Harris a “Marxist,” but the retired university professor has long distanced himself from politics.
For Walsh, it’s neither surprising nor new for a presidential candidate to put his mother — and not his father — in the spotlight.
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — who, like Harris, never highlighted that he would make history by becoming America’s first black president — were both raised by single mothers, Walsh said, and often talked about them during the election campaign. Used to talk.
Those mothers “then become a huge force in their lives, and in talking about who they are and how they grew up, they’ll really be the focal point, right?” He said.
“I mean, it would be weird to think that they wouldn’t do that.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
