How to pronounce her name
After Kamala Harris was named as Joe Biden’s running mate in August 2020, Donald Trump said she was “totally unlikable” and a communist; he twice called her “this monster”. While “monster” is a dehumanising term, the pronoun flags what seems to me to be a racist subtext: not “a” monster, but “this” thing we have all agreed is a monster.
But he also strategically mispronounced her name, elongating the middle “A” to make it sound more foreign. It’s important, therefore, not to get it wrong by accident. It doesn’t rhyme with Pamela; it doesn’t sound like Tony Soprano’s wife. For Americans, it’s “comma” with a “la” at the end and the stress on the first syllable. In Britain, it depends on your accent, but it sounds like “kaw-ma-la” or “karma-la”. The video below from Harris’s 2016 Senate campaign shows children demonstrating the correct pronunciation.
Who her parents are
Harris’s father, Donald, was born in Jamaica in 1938 and moved to the US to do a PhD. He then taught at Stanford, where he is now professor emeritus. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, also studied at Berkeley, having graduated from the University of Delhi. She died in 2009, after spending her career working in breast cancer research. The couple met as civil rights activists and separated in 1969, when Harris was five.
In Harris’s memoir, The Truths We Hold, she writes about her Indian grandparents and their experiences of political activism. Her grandmother was an informal community organiser (she was uneducated and fought on the ground for contraception and against domestic violence); her grandfather was a diplomat and fought for refugee rights, among other things. Broadly speaking, Harris says, she has always preferred to make change from inside institutions rather than outside. However, she doesn’t have an instinctive distrust of outsider activism that characterises more establishment figures.
She was at the coalface of educational desegregation
At her elementary school, Thousand Oaks in Berkeley, Harris was part of only the second year group to be “bussed”, whereby kids from deprived areas were sent to schools in more affluent areas to diversify the pupil intake. She speaks very warmly about the pragmatism and immediate, real-life impact of the policy, which came in for huge amounts of criticism. She recalls in her memoir being part of “a varied bunch”: “Some grew up in public housing and others were the children of professors. I remember celebrating varied cultural holidays at school and learning to count to 10 in several languages.”
Her political self was built at Howard University
Founded in 1867, the Washington DC university known as the Mecca was built specifically to crack open professions – medicine, education and the church – to 4 million formerly enslaved people.
When Harris arrived there in 1982, the fight for racial equality born of the civil rights movement had forked. One side argued that US institutions were inherently racist and would always be unjust as they stood; the other side argued that by improving Black representation in the law and politics, equality would be created from within. Harris was very much in the second camp.
When she went back to address students in 2017, she made that case explicitly: “You can march for Black lives on the street, and you can ensure law-enforcement accountability by serving as a prosecutor or on a police commission. The reality is, on most matters, somebody is going to make the decision – so why not let it be you?”
Her decision to be a prosecutor remains thorny …
In the summer of 1988, Harris got an internship in the district attorney’s office in Oakland. She realised that being a prosecutor was her calling – much to the incredulity of friends and peers, given the US’s “deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice”, as she wrote in her memoir. She makes a solid case that she was working from within to create justice, but it has been levelled against her, notably in 2019 when she was standing for the Democratic presidential nomination. Tulsi Gabbard, then a Hawaii Democratic congresswoman, claimed that she “put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana”.
Harris maintains that prosecutions for low-level drug offences were rare while she was attorney general in California and she made a policy of not pushing for jail time. She wrote of drug prosecutions: “The cases were as easy to prove as they were tragic to charge. In the rush to clean up the streets, we were criminalising a public health crisis.”
… but she knows that mass incarceration is a scandal
African Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans and the sentences for Black men are almost 20% longer than those given to white men. If a Black man is stopped while driving, his car is three times more likely to be searched; if he is arrested, his bail is higher. “It is truly appalling,” she wrote in The Truths We Hold. “It’s one thing to say that Black lives matter. But awareness and solidarity aren’t enough. We need to accept hard truths about the systemic racism that has allowed this to happen.”
She may be a brat
Charli xcx announced today on X: “Kamala IS brat,” referring to the wave of hedonism and messiness to which young women are aspiring in light of her new album, Brat. Harris’s team, understandably delighted, changed the colour on their X feed to the neon green of the album cover.
Rereading xcx’s definition of brat, however, it doesn’t sound exactly like Harris: “You’re just that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but then maybe also has a breakdown … It’s very honest, very blunt, a little bit volatile.” Harris may be straight-talking, but it’s hard to imagine her doing dumb things and you don’t get the impression of volatility. When I think of a brat, I don’t think of her trying to get elected. Nevertheless, to the extent that brat means “lives her life and doesn’t care what you think about that”, then yes, Harris is brat. And she has had to be.
She has faced personal attacks …
Shock jocks and some Fox anchors have been even more critical of Harris than the Republican politicians, describing her baselessly as dishonest and unfit. Rush Limbaugh – inspired by a piece in the Spectator that described her as a “mattress” – speciously asserted that she had slept her way to the top. For a while, T-shirts were available on Amazon that read “Joe and the Hoe”. Listening to the radio in the past hour, I have heard a presenter reference the insult “cackling Kamala”; a society that won’t allow you to laugh is basically trying to exclude you from public life. Some voters have said they find her “condescending”, a retread of the “schoolmarmish” tag that finds female leaders annoying by definition.
… and racism
The racism she experiences is densely layered, containing anti-Black tropes – the “angry Black woman” is there in Trump’s assertions that she is “angry”, “mean”, “aggressive” and “disrespectful”. Tucker Carlson said “she’ll bulldoze her elderly, sentimental boss”. Those Limbaugh assertions about her sexual manipulation shaded from misogyny to misogynoir, recalling the hypersexualised Jezebel.
But her racial identity is also heavily policed. The radio host Mark Levin said: “Kamala Harris is not an African American, she is Indian and Jamaican. Jamaica’s part of the Caribbean. India is out there near China. I only point that out because if you dare raise that, you’re attacked, but the truth is she’s not, and so I just wanted to make that clear.”
The truest thing I ever read about all this was from a political studies fellow, Danielle Casarez Lemi, quoted in the New York Times: “She’s going to be tasked with managing those perceptions of her identity, and that’s time that could be spent on the ground, building relationships with people and formulating policies.”
This is exactly what has happened: the most common critique of Harris is that nobody knows what she stands for. The injustice of that – constantly blaring over someone with bigoted hullaballoo and then complaining that you can’t hear them – makes you think: what a country, what a world.
She stands for a lot
This is Harris on Trump, writing in The Truths We Hold: “We’ve seen an administration align itself with white supremacists at home and cozy up to dictators abroad; rip babies from their mothers’ arms in grotesque violation of their human rights; give corporations and the wealthy huge tax cuts while ignoring the middle class; derail our fight against climate change; sabotage health care and imperil a woman’s right to control her own body; all while lashing out at seemingly everything and everyone, including the very idea of a free and independent press. We are better than this.”
Much of the legislative work for which she was known as a senator tried to create a pathway for people who migrated to the US as children to become citizens, a proposed act known as Dream. Being bipartisan, it got a lot of nakedly xenophobic measures tacked on to it, including $25bn for Trump’s notorious wall, so she ended up voting against the bill, even though she had co-sponsored it.
She really likes Doritos
On the night of the 2016 election, she went out for a large family dinner, went home, watched the results come in, dread for the country mingling uneasily with celebration, ate a family bag of Doritos and “didn’t share a single chip”.
She failed her bar exam the first time
She passed on the retake; no biggie. But when she describes it in her memoir, it’s not to kickstart a homily, merely to observe that, “in studying for the bar, I had put forward the most half-assed performance of my life”. I find that endearing.
One of her first major initiatives as a prosecutor was on recidivism
She created Back on Track, an initiative to reduce reoffending rates by creating networks and opportunities for people leaving prison. This scaled up to become policy across California; the model has since been used elsewhere in the country, including Philadelphia and Atlanta. One group of participants in the early stages of the project wrote a song about her and called themselves ContraBand.
She went to war against mortgage companies after the financial crisis
After becoming attorney general of California, in 2011, she was immediately mired in the foreclosure scandal. Attorneys general nationally were working to get compensation from mortgage companies for their aggressive repossession tactics and all states had been offered a flat deal worth between $2bn and $4bn. She rejected that out of hand – it wasn’t enough money and it didn’t entail enough accountability. In the end, she got $25bn, “a tremendous victory for the people of California”.
She officiated the first gay wedding in California
The ins and outs of the legal wrangle, how bitterly it was fought, we will have to save for another day. But marriage equality was capsized by conservatives, then restored in June 2013 – and she performed the ceremony for Kris Perry and Sandy Stier.
She and her husband were wildly efficient about romance
Harris was set up on a blind date with Doug Emhoff by a friend; the morning after, he emailed her all his availability for the short and medium term. After their third date, they agreed to commit to each other for six months, then evaluate. They performed so well in their appraisal that they were married the following year, in 2014.
Her husband has faced sexism, too
Emhoff in known in the manosphere as “the world’s biggest cuck”, which is to say he is considered cuckolded by her job, work being construed by this metaphor as a form of infidelity. Dark times ahead, folks. A less rude epithet for him is “wife guy”, meaning one who owes his fame to his wife, or is too uxorious.
She doesn’t like the term ‘stepmom’
Emhoff’s children call her Momala. It’s pronounced mom-a-la.
• This article was amended on 23 July 2024. An earlier version referred to the California governor Gavin Newsom as Harris’s potential running mate. While he has been mentioned in that regard, the 12th amendment of the US constitution presents a hurdle because it prohibits electoral college members casting votes for two candidates from their own state. Also, it is Black male offenders whose sentences are on average 20% longer than those of white male offenders, not Black offenders overall, as an earlier version said.
