Kamala Harris: Origins and Political Rise

KamalaHarris she is an American lawyer and politician. She rose to prominence for being the first black attorney general in California, the state in which she was born. She entered politics in 2015, being elected senator from the same state. In 2020, she was chosen as Joe Biden's vice president, Democratic candidate.

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Summary about Kamala Harris

  • Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California.
  • She is the daughter of an Indian scientist and a Jamaican university professor.
  • She holds degrees in Political Science, Economics and Law.
  • She was elected attorney general of San Francisco and California.
  • She was elected Vice President of the United States in 2020.

Early years of Kamala Harris' trajectory

Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California, U.S, in day October 20, 1964. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an Indian woman scientist and researcher. Her father Donald J. Harris, is a Jamaican and retired professor at Stanford University.

Harris' childhood was marked by her contact with African-American, Afro-Jamaican and Indian culture. She spent part of her childhood living in Berkeley, a city near San Francisco. Later, with her parents' divorce, she and her sister moved to Montreal, Canada.

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Kamala Harris had access to good education in the places where she lived and, after finishing her high school, in 1982, she was able to enroll at Howard University. There she majored in Economics and Political Science, returning to California after graduating in 1986. In California, Harris decided to attend Hastings College of the Law at the University of California to study law. She if graduated in Law in 1989, and soon began to work in this area.

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Kamala Harris' professional career

In 1990, she served as Assistant Attorney General for Alameda County, which groups together a number of California cities such as Berkeley and Oakland. Harris served in that position for most of the 1990s, serving from 1990 to 1998. She later took up a position linked to San Francisco City Hall, serving in a repeat offenders unit.

In 2003, Kamala Harris made history by becoming the first black woman of Indian descent to be elected to the office of attorney general of the city of San Francisco. While in the role, she was marked by her strictness with the crimes she dealt with. She also promoted a program that encouraged drug dealers to abandon crime and return to the classroom.

In 2007, Kamala Harris managed to be re-elected to the role. The hard line she took against criminals resulted in a spike in convictions in the city of San Francisco. The following year, she expressed an interest in the position of California attorney general. The election took place in 2010 and resulted in her victory.

During her tenure as California's attorney general, Harris was involved in numerous high-profile legal cases in her state. In 2014, she announced her intention to be re-elected and won the election again, thus determining the extension of her term as attorney general.

  • Kamala Harris' political career

Kamala Harris' entry into American politics came when she expressed her interest in the United States Senate. Harris was already affiliated with the Democratic Party and, for her candidacy, she availed herself of the retirement of Barbara Boxer, a Democratic senator from California. She made her election official in 2015, won the Democratic primary and defeated her opponent, Loretta Sanchez, in 2016.

Harris remained in the role of California Attorney General until the end of 2016 and was sworn in as senator in January 2017. She was the second black woman of Asian descent to hold the position in US history. As a senator, Harris stood in opposition to the US president. Donald Trump.

In the Senate, she was nominated to take over the Homeland Security, Government Affairs, Intelligence, Budget, and later the Judiciary committee. Is it over there maintained a speech in defense of the rights of immigrants and women and criticized several of Trump's measures, such as the Muslim ban — which banned citizens from seven countries (Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Syria) from entering the United States.

Kamala Harris was also noted for her advocacy of gun control in the United States; she defended projects that proposed the creation of a universal health system in the country; she was in favor of advocating the reformulation of US immigration policy, including Criticizing the Trump Administration in that area. The senator was also in favor of the decriminalization of marijuana and against laws that advocated tax cuts for the richest class of American society.

  • Kamala Harris as Vice President of the United States

Kamala Harris' performance as a senator brought her great prominence, and she came to be seen as a potential candidate for the presidency of the United States in the 2020 election. In 2018, Harris officially announced his candidacy for president.

Throughout 2019, her candidacy lost strength in public opinion, either due to a reduction in voting intentions or because of the difficulty in collecting donations for her campaign. So the senator gave up on her. The following year, Democratic candidate Joe Biden announced that he had chosen Harris to be his vice-presidential candidate.

Kamala Harris speaking at the Pentagon alongside Joe Biden and Lloyd Austin
Kamala Harris assumed the US vice presidency in January 2021.[1]

Joe Biden established himself as a presidential candidate after winning the Democratic Party primaries, aiming to defeat Donald Trump, who was fighting for his re-election. In that election, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris emerged victorious by obtaining a majority in the Electoral College. They also got about 81 million votes, about seven million more than Trump. With the victory, Kamala Harris became the first black woman to be elected vice president of the United States. On January 20, 2001, she was sworn in to the role.

Image credits

[1] BiksuTong and shutterstock

by Daniel Neves
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