Editorials

Joe Biden’s announcement that he’d chosen Kamala Harris for his running mate prompted this email from Congresswoman Barbara Lee:

“When I think about my start in politics, I remember the unbossed and unbought Shirley Chisholm inspiring me to fight for what I believe in. She was the first African American woman to serve in Congress and the first Democratic woman to run for president.

“Shirley set us on a path toward progress and now we must continue her fight for equality, fairness, and dignity for all Americans.

“That’s how I know Kamala Harris would make a fantastic Vice President— the first Black woman Vice President.”  

Me, I backed Elizabeth Warren for both president and vice-president, and I still think she’d do an excellent job in either office. But she’ll also get a lot done in the Senate, maybe more than she would have as vice president, given her policy-making and advocacy skills. And as I watched Harris recite her back story in her acceptance speech, I warmed to her candidacy.  

In these days of the televised pre-revolution, every candidate needs a heart-warming back story with an elevator-pitch one sentence summary. Here are a few:  

Joe Biden: Commuted by train to Congress so I could be a good dad.  

Bernie Sanders: Still not a Dem after all these years as a kinda-sorta Socialist.  

Elizabeth Warren: Couldn’t be here without my Aunt Bea’s help with child care.  

And Kamala Harris? Per her details in that speech: Just a Berkeley girl at heart. 

As someone who’s spent the better part of sixty years in Berkeley on and off, I recognized her story. Kamala is a contemporary of my three daughters, the same age as my middle daughter, both of them born in 1964. That’s the year that the Mississippi Freedom Democrats tried to get seated at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic. I went there for a day as a very pregnant ally, not a delegate, and was thrilled to shake Reverend King’s hand. 

Like many Berkeley girls, Kamala was born in Oakland because Kaiser’s there, but she’s Berkeley through and through. Like my daughters, she went to demonstrations in a stroller. Those were civilized early-'60spickets and marches, mainly directed at shaming slightly liberal Democratic officeholders of the Kennedy-Johnson decade. 

In Ann Arbor, where I lived then, our social change goals in the years when Kamala and my daughters were toddlers were modest. We were simply trying to persuade moderate Republicans on the Ann Arbor City Council to support a law prohibiting housing discrimination based on race. It took us two or three years of picketing city hall every Monday with babies in strollers and backpacks to accomplish that goal, aided by the 1965 election of the first African-American City Council member since Reconstruction, whose campaign I managed. 

Mixed marriages like that of Kamala’s parents were still illegal in many states in the'60s. Parents of biracial kids born in the ‘60s, some of them my good friends, needed to make a conscious effort to ensure that their offspring were comfortable with both sides of their heritage. 

I had a couple of friends in those days who were very much like her mother: Indian women from privileged backgrounds who came to the United States for graduate school to broaden their horizons. Lately I’ve learned from the Indian press that her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was what they call a Tambram—a member of the elite Brahman caste from the Tamil Nadu area. Going abroad to study was quite daring for Indian girls like that in the early 1960s. 

One Indian journalist points out that for a girl from a Brahmin family—" a caste that fetishized light skin and went to extraordinary lengths to argue that it was racially distinct from the non-Brahmin Tamil population in which it was historically embedded”— to marry someone of African descent was even more daring, just as it was for Americans of European descent to do that. 

Though Kamala Harris’s parents eventually separated, her mother made sure to become part of the Black community. She took her place in the East Bay’s vigorous African-American upper middle class-- I’m told by a reliable source that Shyamala was even admitted to the exclusive bridge club maintained in those days by and for female members of Oakland’s Black elite. 

It’s likely that Kamala’s decision to attend a historically Black university was strongly influenced by the way her mother brought her up. At Howard she joined a national African-American sorority which is highly respected for members’ traditional lifetime record of public service. 

And then there was Shirley Chisholm. She was not only African-American, she was Afro-Caribbean like Kamala’s father. 

Here’s the current Wikipedia take on what Shirley Chisholm meant to many: 

“Chisholm has been a major influence on other women of color in politics, among them California Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who stated in a 2017 interview that Chisholm had a profound impact on her career.^[81]” 

Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 run for President, the first African American and the first woman to do so, seems to have made as much of an impression on young Kamala, all of eight years old, as it did on Barbara Lee and on our family. I was on the Michigan steering committee for the Chisholm primary campaign. My daughters took part in it, especially enjoying handing out “Shirley Chisholm for President” balloons on the University of Michigan campus. 

Wikipedia again: 

“Kamala Harris recognized Chisholm's presidential campaign by using a similar color scheme and typography in her own 2020 presidential campaign's promotional materials and logo.^[82] announcing Harris's run for president.  

" Harris launched her presidential campaign forty-seven years to the day after Chisholm's presidential campaign.^[83]” 

Just this week, Harris has done an expert job of standing up to the excesses of the Republican ticket—Berkeley can be proud of her. Congresswoman Lee’s been a staunch supporter of Kamala Harris from the beginning of her presidential campaign. And as the perennial bumper sticker says, Barbara Lee speaks for me. 

^t