For the uninitiated, Kamala Harris is of Indian and Jamaican origin and has become the first woman of colour to be America’s Vice President. 

Born in Oakland, California on October 20, 1964, Harris is the eldest of two children born to Dr Shyamala Gopalan, cancer researcher and Donald Harris, an economist from Jamaica. 

As a child, Harris grew up along with her sister Maya in a predominantly black neighbourhood after their parents divorced when she was about 7. Harris speaks about this in her autobiography. 

My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters… and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women. 

While in high school in Montreal, a 13-year-old Harris and younger sister Maya led a protest in front of their apartment building in protest of a policy that banned children from playing on the lawn. 

In 1990, she passed the California bar and joined the Alameda County prosecutor’s office in Oakland as an assistant district attorney focusing on sex crimes.

In 2003, In 2003, she ran for district attorney in San Francisco against her former boss, Terence Hallinan. Her message, accordig to POLITICO, was-  ‘We’re progressive, like Terence Hallinan, but we’re competent like Terence Hallinan is not’.

With this victory, she became the first Black woman in California to be elected district attorney.

However, her time as a prosecutor and district attorney doesn’t sit well with most people, given that the conviction rate jumped from 52 to 67 per cent in her first 3 years. In 2004, she declined to pursue the death penalty against the murderer of a San Francisco cop, Isaac Espinoza.

However, she later declined to support two ballot initiatives that would have banned the death penalty. 

Her lack of consistency on the matter has led many to accuse her of political opportunism. 

In 2012, when she was the attorney general, Harris was advised to file a civil enforcement action against OneWest Bank for ‘widespread misconduct’ when foreclosing homes.

However, she refused to sue the bank or its then CEO Steven Mnuchin, who currently serves as the Treasury Secretary for the Trump administration. 

She has also been accused of nothing doing much against police brutality during her time as the attorney general, especially after she refused to investigate cops shooting two black men in 2014 and 2015. 

She married Doug Emhoff, a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles, in 2014. His kids call her ‘Momala’.  

Harris was considered one of the big names during the democratic primaries but she had dropped out after low poll numbers and accusations that she mistreated her staff and let her sister Maya have too much influence. 

As Vice President Kamala Harris creates history, we wish her more power!