Harris represents hope, if not reform
integrate public schools in the 1970s. She’s called for charging the police officers in Breonna Taylor’s death. While some of her conservative colleagues lobbed softballs at Senate hearings, Harris unflinchingly pressed business executives and a U.S. Supreme Court nominee. She raised concerns about the coronavirus in January.
In June, she introduced legislation to change the culture of law enforcement by holding officers and agencies more accountable. It prohibits racial, religious and discriminatory profiling, and bans choke holds, carotid holds and noknock warrants at the federal level.
But that’s not enough. It’s piecemeal — and we’re long overdue for policy that dramatically improves outcomes for people of color in poor neighborhoods.
“We have to stop moving the furniture around in our dysfunctional house and calling it progress,” Brooklyn Williams, the East Bay program director at New Door Ventures, a company that connects youths to jobs, told me. “We need to build new houses.”
Harris has had chances to make great change. But she didn’t do enough as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s top law enforcement official to advance criminal justice reform.
As district attorney and attorney general, Harris had a waitandsee approach to prosecuting police misconduct. She resisted calls to investigate questionable shootings. She supported a law that punished the parents of truant children. She didn’t push against the tough-on-crime policies that disproportionately impact people of color. She didn’t target racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
“I think there are a lot of folks who have been truly harmed by the criminal justice system, which is really undergoing a thorough review, as it should,” Khadijah White, an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, told me. “And her part in it is a serious matter that needs consideration. If you build your career on the top of Black bodies, you have to explain it. It has to be accounted for at some point.”
Still, I agree with White on this: A lot of the criticism against Harris wouldn’t happen if she were a white man. Debate stages aren’t the place for nuanced answers about how a candidate’s stance on issues has evolved.
“I understand the ways in which the world puts ceilings and limits on ambitious Black women, and I understand Kamala Harris had to navigate all of that,” she said. “And that means that in any position of power and authority that she had while she had power, it was also quite restrained.”
On Jan. 27, 2019, about 20,000 people were in and around Latham Square, the plaza in front of Oakland City Hall, for the start of Harris’ presidential campaign. Here’s something I noticed on that celebratory day: On any given morning, afternoon or night, the square is bustling with people, many of them homeless and many Black. But on that Sunday, those people were cleared to make room for Harris, who didn’t mention homelessness in her speech, according to a transcript published by KTVU.
Less than two months before she suspended her campaign in December 2019, Harris introduced ambitious legislation to end homelessness. The bill is collecting dust.
Harris might not be the conduit for generational change that this country desperately needs, but what her selection represents — the hope and possibility of a more inclusive America — is a step in the right direction. But there’s so much more at stake.
First, the president has to get evicted from the White House.
“Our country is facing an existential threat,” said Paterson, the president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, an Oakland legal organization focused on civil rights and antidiscrimination. “Kamala is on the right side of that divide, and we’ve just got to get behind BidenHarris and get (President) Trump out of here.
“After Jan. 20, let’s talk about criminal justice. We don’t have time for that now. Trump is going to do everything he can to steal the election.”