Oakland 'hella proud' as Harris joins Biden – despite progressives' misgivings
The mayor of Oakland rang in Tuesday’s news that Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate with a bit of hometown slang: “Hella proud,” Libby Schaaf tweeted.
The historic selection of the California senator to a major party’s presidential ticket – Harris is the first woman of black and south Asian descent to run for vice-president – was cause for hometown chest-thumping for many in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“In Oakland, we are proud of Kamala Harris for being the first Black and AAPI woman to be nominated for Vice President,” said the congresswoman Barbara Lee.
“I’m crying with joy right now,” tweeted the state assemblywoman Buffy Wicks. “[Harris] is the hope that me and my little girls need right now.”
“Vice-President Harris would be a win for many,” said Nenner Joiner, owner of Feelmore, Oakland’s only black-owned sex shop.
Yet perhaps unsurprisingly in a county with a long history of radical politics and where more than half of residents voted for the progressives Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic primary – and where Sanders supporters picketed outside Joe Biden’s Oakland election day stopover – some residents’ enthusiasm was tempered by Harris’ track record as a prosecutor and attorney general, as well as some of her votes in the Senate.
“I think there was a bit of cognitive dissonance for me given the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the conversation around defunding the police,” said Terry Taplin, a candidate for Berkeley city council. Even so, he said: “It is really exciting to see a black and south Asian woman from the East Bay get the pick.”
Harris was born in Oakland just two years before Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panthers there. She grew up over the border in Berkeley at the height of anti-war and civil rights activism, accompanying her immigrant parents to marches and protests in her stroller.
She cut her teeth in politics in the Bay Area, becoming a household name as she won bids for district attorney of San Francisco, attorney general of Californiaand eventually the state’s junior senator.
Following Tuesday’s announcement, those in local politics were quick to post their pictures with Harris and recount their tales of “I knew her when …”
Some Berkeley and Oakland residents engaged in a playful turf war, with Berkeley trying to claim the former San Francisco district attorney with her
“Berkeley-raised” descriptor and Oakland calling her for “Oakland-born”.
“She was born at Kaiser Oakland but lived her first 12 years in Berkeley. I think we all know that means Berkeley has got dibs on her,” tweeted the local news outlet Berkeleyside, with a winking emoji.
“We have a black woman on the ticket,” said Aimee Allison, an Oakland resident who is the founder and president of She the People, a national organization focused on women of color in politics. “After all of this organizing, making the case, helping to expand the imaginations of the American people, we finally have, the first in history, the opportunity to lead.”
But the same criticisms of Harris’s record as a prosecutor that dogged her in her presidential bidpersist and at times ring loudly in a region that touts its progressive politics – and is intensely debating the role of law enforcement following the George Floyd protests.
“I’m no more moved today with excitement than I was yesterday,” said Carroll Fife, a community organizer running for Oakland city council. “I know she has personal relationships here and people are really happy. But the fight for the things I care about and the things my friends and family care about in Oakland are not well served by either party.”
The Oakland activist Cat Brooks prefaced her thoughts on the VP pick with this tidbit: “In 2016, I said it doesn’t matter if it’s Trump or Hillary, life in America will suck for Black people no matter what. I’ll be the first to say I was very, very wrong.
“Priority No 1 is getting Trump out of the office,” Brooks continued. “But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. I’m not going to support Kamala because I think she’s an amazing person. I’m not going to support her because she’s a black woman. I owe my loyalty to the black people she spent years prosecuting, but I think from an organizing perspective, [supporting her and Biden is] the most strategic thing to do.
“I think a lot of people need to get off their political high horses and need to get down to business with getting Biden into office and then get down to business with how we hold Biden and Harris accountable,” she said.