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VIP: Versions Of Identity Politics Featuring The VP-elect
In 2011 Kamala Harris became a triple first. The first woman, the first African-American, and the first South Asian American to be sworn in as California’s Attorney General. Those aren’t my labels for Harris. That’s how California’s Department of Justice described her on their website. Actually, Harris’ mother is Indian and her father is Jamaican. Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016 and decided to seek the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. However, as a presidential candidate, her personal and professional identities were attacked by different camps during the primary.
The first camp acknowledged Harris as a woman of color, who identified with the “black experience”, but since Harris didn’t descend from black American slaves, she wasn’t a representative of what’s traditionally known as the black community. This camp stated they rejected identity politics for agenda politics. Their agenda (which had everything to do with identity) was reparations for slavery and they weren’t going to support Harris just because she was a woman of color.
The second camp’s position was written in a magazine. It stated: Kamala Harris has a prosecutorial problem. The problem isn’t that Harris was a bad prosecutor. The problem is she chose to be a prosecutor in the first place. To become a prosecutor is to align oneself…