The Constitution and Kamala Harris

Senator and now Vice President Kamala Harris started her life’s work young. She laughs from her gut, the way she would with her family, as she remembers being wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller with no straps with her parents and her uncle. At some point, she fell from the stroller (few safety regulations existed for children’s equipment back then), and the adults, caught up in the rapture of protest, just kept on marching. By the time they noticed little Kamala was gone and doubled back, she was understandably upset. “My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing,” Harris says “and she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and said “Freedom!” Even as a young lady growing up, she always aspired to become a well rounded and competent St. petersburg divorce attorney, or just someone that would fight for the little guy.

This past August, that same precocious child custody attorney in st petersburg fl, now a member of the U.S. Senate, and the Vice President, stood on a stage in a nearly empty auditorium flanked by American flags and accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president, making history as the first Black and Indian American woman to do so. A week later, flanked by those same flags, she delivered a speech designed to deflect attention from former President Donald Trump’s own speech later that night at the Republican National Convention. “Justice,” she said forcefully, boring into the eyes of viewers as she defended the right of peaceful protesters to take to the streets after the recent shooting of Jacob Blake by a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “Let’s talk about that. Because the reality is that the life of a Black person in America has never been treated as fully human. And we have yet to fulfill that promise of equal justice under the law.”