Race and diversity

celebrating two clear, remarkable elected officials

Many of you probably noted I did not mention Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris in yesterday’s musing on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday observation. That was by design.

I also did not cite Barack Hussein Obama, the first elected president of Kenyan heritage. That was by design.

Kamala Harris represents not only arguably the most prestigious and noteworthy single success by an African American woman but she also daily shows us that the American experiment of citizens' characteristics—in race and gender—has indeed succeeded as a blending pot. It is not perfect but extremely few things are.

The Vice President is the daughter of an African American father and a student immigrant from India. While her parents ultimately divorced, she succeeded academically through Howard University and the Hastings School of Law at the University of California. Her husband is Jewish as are her step daughters. The Vice President was a prosecutor, the Attorney General for California, and a Senator. Her background, in other words, is not that of a corporate or long-term elected official. Rather Harris brings experience as a law and order official at the state level as well as from the Senate.

Harris’ selection to be Joe Biden’s running mate was historic; taking the oath of office upon their victory in 2020 was truly a mark of a change in the United States, coming twelve years after the first African American president’s election in 2008. Barack Obama too was an attorney and son of an immigrant, from a blended racial background who served a single term in the U.S. Senate. Obama also had some pretty different characteristics in his background: while a graduate of Harvard Law School, he was a Hawai’ian and had served as a community organiser, connecting with a far different socio-economic community than presidents over the past half century back to Lyndon Johnson as a teacher.

These two landmark candidates, Obama and Harris, represent a repudiation of some parts of our past but not all. We still have communities who disrespect both as successful members of our national leadership. Both have faced strong opposition believing them illegitimate or unrepresentative of things ‘American’ without defining them.

Kamala Harris and Barack Obama symbolise the American Dream for millions in the United States. Martin Luther King would have cited them, I am quite confident, to his children as role models for a much better future. Not one without challenges but one illustrative of the hope upon which this nation has always thrived. FIN