Socialist or sellout? Harris is as complicated as Berkeley
Since Kamala Harris was elected vice president we’ve been checking off the many firsts she represents. First female veep. First Black veep. First South Asian veep. Harris is a walking sign of progress, especially as she arrives amid the dust of arguably the most reactionary administration in American history.
These milestones are all worth celebrating. But there’s another one that lies particularly close to my average white man heart. Harris, a former California senator and attorney general, is the first vice president to hail from Berkeley. (She was born in the bigger, bordering city of Oakland, but spent her formative years in B-Town.)
You may also know my hometown as Berzerkeley. Or the People’s Republic of Berkeley. Whatever. Now you can call us Home of the Veep.
That means you can haul out all your Berkeley stereotypes. And then throw many of them away, because Berkeley is a more complicated place than most think. Harris is, too. Conservatives paint her as a radical leftist, and radical leftists dismiss her as sellout. She’s neither and both, as confounding as Berkeley itself — and that bodes well for America. We desperately need leaders who defy easy categories.
The child of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, both graduate students at University of California, Berkeley, Harris grew up in a yellow duplex just a few blocks from my childhood home, in the flatlands, or West Berkeley. It’s an extremely diverse neighborhood, near the waterfront, not far from Malcolm X Elementary School. Yes, Berkeley has a Malcolm X Elementary School. Because, Berkeley.
I didn’t go to Malcolm X. Neither did Harris. She was bussed to Thousand Oaks Elementary School, nestled behind the quirky retail and dining haven of Solano Avenue. I remember Thousand Oaks for its enticingly low basketball rims. My friends liked playing there because they could dunk. Today at Thousand Oaks, which we called T.O., you’ll find a mural featuring the likenesses of Serena Williams, Anne Frank, Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai, labor leader Dolores Huerta, sculptor Ruth Asawa… and Harris. A Berkeley city council member has introduced a resolution to rename Thousand Oaks after the vice president-elect.
Harris, now 56, is six years older than I. That means she was near the ground floor of Berkeley’s bussing program. As she writes in her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” “I only learned later that we were part of a national experiment in desegregation, with working-class Black children from the flatlands being bused in one direction and wealthier white children from the Berkeley hills bused in the other.”
I knew those wealthier white
children. I coveted their alligator shirts and Patagonia jackets. Socioeconomically I had less in common with them than I did Harris. Those Berkeley hills housed a lot of rich white kids.
Harris grew up in a headier Berkeley. I read about the free speech movement; Harris’ parents participated in it. As a child Harris hung out at the Rainbow Sign, a Berkeley Black cultural center where one might run into Alice Walker one day, Nina Simone the next.
My Berkeley was cool, but not that cool. I did march against the first Gulf War. And I remember when Berkeley ditched Columbus Day for Indigenous People’s Day, in 1992. Many cities across the country have since followed suit, including Houston in its own way, but we were the first.
By then I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, and I was starting to realize my hometown was not representative of, well, many places. One incident sticks in my mind. David Irving, the notorious Holocaust denier, was scheduled to speak at a location just off campus. A group of antifascists, some with bottles and rocks, trashed the venue. What I didn’t remember until recently looking at news archives: Irving was allowed to finish his speech once the police settled things down. The whole thing shook me. First, the fact that a Holocaust denier was ever invited to speak, that the free speech movement could extend this far. Then, the violence that ensued, and the fact that, once itwas over, hewas allowed to go on with his presentation. It all seemed crazy, even for Berkeley.
By then Harris was well into her career, as a deputy district attorney for Alameda County (which includes Berkeley and Oakland). She would eventually become the state’s attorney general. This, to me, is the most fascinating thing about Harris, and the thing that still rankles those who question her liberal bona fides. The girl from ’60s Berkeley, a symbol of diversity and equality and all those other ideas that make conservatives nervous, made her career bones as a prosecutor.
In her memoir she writes she “wanted to be on the front lines of criminal justice reform.” Her liberal critics don’t buy it. They say she resisted reform and upheld wrongful convictions. Blake Simons, assistant director of UC Berkeley’s Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center and co-creator of the Hella Black Podcast, said on Twitter: “Both Obama and Harris are enemies to the Pan-African struggle for global liberation.” Again, welcome to Berkeley.
The most unique take I’ve read on Harris’ career comes from Reginald Dwayne Betts. A poet, author and teacher, a
Black man who went to prison for carjacking and who became a lawyer when he got out, Betts recently wrote his story and take on Harris in the New York Times Magazine. He had been locked up for more than eight years. When he got out of prison, his mother told him she had been raped while he was away. “My mother told me her rapist was a Black man,” Betts writes. “And I thought he should spend the rest of his years staring at the pockmarked walls of a prison cell that I knew so well.”
As a felon, Betts saw the devastation wrought by prosecutors who sent young Black men, and teens, to prison for far too long. As a son, he wanted the prosecutor to have sent the man who raped his mother to prison for far longer. That double vision gives him an ability to grapple with the seeming contradictions of Harris’ career as a prosecutor and politician.
Betts describes going to hear Harris speak last year. She talked about the importance of “prosecuting criminal defendants who had victimized Black people and protecting the rights of Black criminal defendants.” Mothers sought her out, asking her to investigate the murders of their children. At the same time, she spoke of wanting to counter the “prosecutors that refused to seat Black jurors, refused to prosecute lynchings, disproportionately condemned young Black men to death row and looked the other way in the face of police brutality.”
Harris has written about “howmuch it mattered to have compassionate people working as prosecutors,” people who could look out for those most in need of justice. Compassion, I like to think, is very much a Berkeley value. We’re just not accustomed to thinking of it as part of a top cop’s playbook. As much as her enemies on the right want to label her a socialist, a trick they also tried with Obama, her record is that of a centrist — much to the disappointment of her enemies on the left. Perhaps “centrist” isn’t the right word for all the dueling extremes that Harris has worked to reconcile.
Of course, her Berkeley roots make it easier for the lazy or opportunistic to wield that socialist tag. Indigenous People’s Day. Malcolm X Elementary. The Rainbow Sign (which took its name from the words of a Black spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.”)
Find a place to pull over in those hills and you can take it all in at once. The elite public university. The constantly gentrifying flatlands. The scores of Black middle class communities. The low-income areas and lush green hills of Oakland nearby. And San Francisco beckoning from across the bay, just as it did to Harris when she made the jump to become that city's district attorney.
It’s a complicated place, and Harris embodies its complexities. Easy as it might be to reduce Berkeley to a caricature, the city is defined by its contradictions. And America could use leaders who were raised in between these contradictions, who can look at multifaceted issues from a variety of perspectives.
So hail to the veep, child of the radical ’60s who grew up to enforce the law. Only in Berkeley? No. Only in America.