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Name: The Truths We Hold
Rating: 4.1 (44 reviews)
Author: Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris

An American Journey

4.1 (44 Bewertungen)

28 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

In 'The Truths We Hold', Kamala Harris shares her journey as a prosecutor, attorney general, senator, and now Vice President of the United States. She discusses her policies and beliefs, and how they were shaped by her experiences and those she's met along the way.

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What’s in it for me? A portrait of a presidential hopeful.

The American political landscape has undergone a dramatic shift. While Donald Trump was shaking things up in the Republican Party, Hillary Clinton was fighting off the surprisingly strong challenge of Bernie Sanders. In both parties, there’s a widespread sense that old orthodoxies are up for debate and that voters’ positions on the key issues of the day are shifting.

That’s reflected in the emergence of new faces in an increasingly diverse Senate and Congress. While the 2016 elections are usually remembered for Trump’s unexpected victory, the election of a group of politicians who do things differently might prove to be just as important in the long run. One woman who’s been making waves since taking up her seat in the Senate is Kamala Harris.

The daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, a lifelong campaigner for equality and an experienced legal mind, Harris quickly made a name for herself on Capitol Hill with her outspoken commitment to reform.

But who is Kamala Harris? Well, that’s just what we’ll be looking at in these blinks. From her childhood in Oakland to her work as a District Attorney in San Francisco and her senatorial career, these blinks will paint a portrait of a lawyer and politician on the rise. So read on to find out:

why Harris decided to become a prosecutor;
what her positions on healthcare, security and immigration are; and
why she believes that everyone deserves a second chance.

Kamala Harris’s parents were gifted immigrants, and she knew early on that she wanted to be a lawyer.

Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964. Her father, Donald Harris, a Jamaican, came to the US to study economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, came from Southern India. Gopalan’s parents encouraged their daughter to apply to Berkeley – a university she’d never seen in a country she’d never stepped foot in – when she was just 19.

Gopalan arrived in 1958 and enrolled in a doctorate program in nutrition and endocrinology. She quickly became involved with the black community and threw herself into the civil rights movement. It was during a protest in Berkeley that she first met fellow activist Donald Harris. After falling in love, the couple decided to settle down in Oakland for good. Gopalan embarked on her career as a researcher specializing in breast cancer while he began teaching economics.

Kamala Harris’s early childhood was a happy one. The family’s home was filled with books, Indian spices and her father’s jazz records. When John Coltrane wasn’t on in the background, Harris’s mother – a talented vocalist who’d won awards in India – sang along to gospel tunes by the likes of Aretha Franklin. But these carefree days wouldn’t last. Donald and Shyamala had married young and drifted apart over time.

Donald headed to Wisconsin to pursue his academic work. Shyamala was offered a job at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The opportunity was too good to turn down and she accepted. Kamala found the move difficult. She missed her friends and sunny California. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Montreal wasn’t just a colder and lonelier city for the twelve-year-old – it was also French-speaking! She remembers joking that she sounded like a duck during her first days at school as the only thing she could say was “Quoi? Quoi? Quoi?” or “What? What? What?”

Harris did eventually settle in, however, and her thoughts turned to her future. What did she want to do with her life? She’d always done well in school, and there was the inspiring example set by her mother. But her heroes weren’t doctors or academics: the people she admired most were lawyers like Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American on the Supreme Court, and Constance Baker Motley, a New York State Senator. Both were giants of the civil rights movement who had championed justice. How, she wondered, could she become like them?

Harris decided to become a prosecutor after studying at Howard University.

After high school, Harris returned to the US to study economics and politics at Howard University in Washington, D.C. It was an institution she’d heard a lot about from relatives who’d studied there. Established just after the Civil War to provide talented black students with the education other institutions denied them, Howard University had endured through over a century of segregation and discrimination.

Harris arrived in the fall of 1982. The freshman orientation session was an eye-opener. She recalls looking around and thinking “This is heaven!” She’d never been among so many people who looked like her yet were so different. Her peers included both the children of Howard alumni and kids whose parents had never been to college; urbanites and rural folk; Africans and Caribbeans. The message all of them were given was that they were – in the words of a Nina Simone song – “young, gifted and black.”

One of the defining moments in Harris’s legal career came before she’d even passed her exams.

Harris first stepped foot in the Alameda County Superior Courthouse in Oakland, California, in the summer of 1988. She was in her final year of law school and was about to take the bar exam which would qualify her as a legal practitioner. Things were moving quickly: she’d already been offered an internship in the office of the District Attorney – DA for short – and was about to get her first taste of the law in action.

As an intern, Harris had little power or influence. Her job was to learn the ins and outs of a working court and get to know the criminal justice system from the inside. It would be a revelatory experience, and it was in the courtrooms in Alameda that she first discovered what kind of lawyer she wanted to become.

Practical experience on the frontline of the justice system taught Harris more than law school.

Harris finished law school in the spring of 1989 and took the bar exam in July. Her future looked bright, and she was already looking forward to the life she’d always dreamed of. Best of all? She already had a job lined up as a deputy DA in Oakland!

In November, however, she received a letter notifying her that she’d failed her examinations. The blow was softened by her new employer’s understanding attitude. The DA’s office agreed to keep her on as a clerk while she prepared to resit the exam. Still, being surrounded by peers who’d already passed the bar was humiliating. The low point came when she overheard a colleague remarking “But she’s so smart, how could she have not passed?”

Harris’s experience as a DA in San Francisco convinced her to run for elected office.

By 1998, Harris had already spent nine years in the Alameda County DA’s office and had earned her spurs as a prosecutor. It was a job she loved, but other opportunities were on the horizon. That year she was hired to run the career criminal unit – a section dealing with repeat offenders – at the San Francisco DA’s Office.

The job had upsides and downsides. On the one hand, it was a step up. She would be running her own department and overseeing a team of prosecutors – a great chance to grow. On the other hand, it was an office with a distinctly dubious reputation. The place itself was run-down, shabby and disorganized. When she arrived, there was just one computer for every two lawyers and no filing system. Lawyers were rumored to simply toss out old files once their cases had been concluded!

Harris ran for DA to tackle systemic injustices like mass incarceration.

Early on in her campaign to become San Francisco’s DA in 2003, Harris commissioned a poll to see how many people knew her. The answer? Six percent! That made her campaign against Terence Hallinan, the popular incumbent, a tough one. But through a lot of hard work, Harris persevered and was inaugurated in 2004.

She had run because she knew she was up to the job, but there was more at stake than her desire to prove herself. The DA’s office was a mess and change was long overdue. Harris’s victory was already progressive. The election of a black woman was a breakthrough in a justice system as unrepresentative as America’s. This still hasn’t changed: according to a 2015 report, 95 percent of all elected prosecutors are white and 79 percent are men.

Becoming a senator was a natural extension of the work Harris was doing as California’s DA.

In 2015, the Democratic senator for California, Barbara Boxer, announced that she wouldn’t stand for reelection after 24 years in office. Harris had made a name for herself as a progressive DA and was ideally placed to replace the liberal Boxer. After mulling it over, she threw her hat in the ring and announced her candidacy.

The campaign was a hardfought one. While a Democratic candidate was virtually guaranteed to win, coming out on top against the party’s other leading lights was a different matter altogether – especially with an opponent as tough as the seasoned congresswoman Loretta Sanchez. Harris spent months touring California in what became known as the “Kamoji,” a bus featuring a massive emoji of Harris’s face. Harris was eventually elected to the US Senate to represent California in November 2016.

Harris has advocated for the rights of Central American immigrants in the US.

Many immigrants arriving in the US come from the Northern Triangle, an area of Central America which includes El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The life of those nations’ inhabitants is scarred by horrific violence. Between 2011 and 2014, nearly 50,000 people were murdered in the Triangle. Escape to the US is often the only option left to desperate families.

Immigration from Central America had been on Harris’s radar for some time. In 2014, for example, an unprecedented number of minors fled the triangle, but the “welcome” they received in the US shocked Harris. When busses carrying 140 undocumented children and parents made their way to a local processing center in the small Californian town of Murrieta, enraged locals blocked their route and waved around signs reading “You’re not welcome!” and “Nobody wants you!”

Harris wants to reform the American healthcare system and reconceptualize healthcare as a right.

In 2008, Harris and her sister went out for dinner with their mother. When their mother arrived wearing a fancy outfit and a new hairdo out of keeping with her usual casual outfits, they knew something was up. What they didn’t know was just how bad her news was: she had colon cancer.

That day ranks as one of the worst in Harris’s life. But here’s the thing: all of us will have at least one of these days. At some point, everyone will have a profound interaction with the healthcare system.

Harris had a ringside seat for the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

When Harris first arrived in the US Senate, she was surprised to learn that there was a free seat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. When she asked her predecessor Barbara Boxer about it, she was told that senators avoided the job because it didn’t put them in the limelight – after all, most the issues discussed by the committee are confidential matters of national security.

That didn’t bother Harris. This was a chance to learn about the threats to her constituents and country in real time. Events, however, would conspire to thrust the usually secretive committee into the center of public attention. After she was sworn in on January 6, 2017, an intelligence report concluding that Russian cyber operations had attempted to influence the 2016 presidential election went public. The Select Committee on Intelligence, and Harris, suddenly found themselves in the eye of the storm!

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Worum geht es in The Truths We Hold?

The Truths We Hold (2019) is an intimate self-portrait of one of the rising forces in contemporary American political life: Californian Senator and civil rights activist Kamala Harris. Combining the personal with the political, Harris sheds light on her early years as the daughter of immigrants, her legal career in the Golden State and the causes she has championed as an elected representative in Trump’s America.

Bestes Zitat aus The Truths We Hold

It was revelatory, a moment that proved how much it mattered to have compassionate people working as prosecutors.

—Kamala Harris

Wer The Truths We Hold lesen sollte

Politics and history buffs
Anyone interested in the life and views of a potential presidential candidate
Legal professionals and civil rights activists

Über den Autor

Kamala Harris is the vice president of the United States. A former US senator from California, she began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office before being elected District Attorney of San Francisco. As a politician, she has led campaigns to raise the minimum wage, cut the cost of higher education and protect the rights of immigrants.

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