There’s a vignette that Senator Kamala Harris likes to tell about her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris. It’s a well-trodden soundbite that has proliferated into hashtags and official 2020 campaign merchandise, but the commercialization shouldn’t detract from its meaning: An immigrant from India who came to the United States with dreams of curing cancer, Shyamala raised Harris and her sister Maya to be strong Black women who are mindful of what their identities mean in American work and life. “My mother would look at me,” Harris has said, “and she’d say, ‘Kamala you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you are not the last.’”
Shyamala was right: Her daughter has been “the first” a number of times. In 2010, Harris became the first African-American and first woman to serve as California’s attorney general. In 2016, she became the first Indian-American woman to be elected to the United States Senate. In August of 2020, she became the first Black woman and first Asian-American woman to appear on the presidential ticket of a major political party.
On Saturday, November 7, the Associated Press projected that former vice president Joe Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, won the state of Pennsylvania and have earned more than 270 electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election. Senator Harris can therefore add more firsts to her list: she is officially the first female vice president-elect in United States history and the first person of color to earn the distinction as well.
In her first public statement after the race was called—a tweet—Harris didn’t mention these firsts. “This election is about so much more than @JoeBiden or me,” she said. “It’s about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s get started.”
