Kamala Harris: A new chapter in US politics
WASHINGTON: For more than two centuries, the top ranks of American power have been dominated by men - almost all of them white. That ends on Wednesday.
Kamala Harris will become the first female vice-president and the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to hold the role. Her rise is historic in any context, another moment when a stubborn boundary will fall away, expanding the idea of what’s possible in American politics.
But it’s particularly meaningful because Harris will be taking office at a moment of deep consequence, with Americans grappling over the role of institutional racism and confronting a pandemic that has disproportionately devastated Black and brown communities.
Those close to Harris say she’ll bring an important - and often missing - perspective in the debates on how to overcome the many hurdles facing the incoming administration. “In many folks’ lifetimes, we experienced a segregated United States,” said Lateefah Simon, a civil rights advocate and longtime Harris friend and mentee. “You will now have a Black woman who will walk into the White House not as a guest but as a second in command of the free world.”
Harris - the child of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, a stepmother of two and the wife of a Jewish man - “carries an
intersectional story of so many Americans who are never seen and heard”.
Harris, 56, moves into the vice-presidency just four years after she first went to Washington as a senator from California, where she’d previously served as attorney general and as San Francisco’s district attorney.
Her swearing-in comes almost two years to the day after Harris launched her own presidential bid on Martin Luther King Jr Day in 2019.
Vogue to release new Kamala Harris cover
Vogue will publish a limited edition of its latest issue featuring a different photo of Harris after the original cover image sparked controversy, the magazine said on Tuesday. Critics slammed the photo that graced the hard copy of the February issue, saying it was poorly composed. Social media users criticised the lighting of the photo.