How Kamala Harris was shaped by 'the People's Republic of Berkeley' by AndrewRomano
If you want to understand where Kamala Harris is coming from, listen to her talk about Berkeley, Calif. — the city where she spent the first dozen years of her life. Listen, in particular, to how she talks about Berkeley to black audiences.
It’s a story that Harris has told many times before. The reason she relies on it is to explain, and defend, what happened next. Inspired by the “heroes” of her childhood — from civil rights icons such as Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley to the “first generation of black lawyers” to emerge from her “community” in Berkeley — she decided to become a lawyer too.“So my family gathered ’round and said, ‘OK, Kamala, so what are you gonna do in your fight for justice?’” Harris recalled.
In other words, to understand where Kamala Harris is coming from — to understand the choice that has defined her career and will continue to complicate her presidential campaign — you have to understand what she learned, as a young woman, about the power and limitations of being on “the outside, banging down the door on bended knee.”
Shyamala, a star student and nationally recognized singer, graduated from the University of Delhi at 19, then left home for California. Diminutive, dark-skinned and attuned to injustice, she “chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in [Berkeley’s] black community” from “almost the moment she arrived,” Harris writes in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold.” “It was the foundation of her new American life.
“I was awed by them,” says early member Aubrey Labrie, whom Kamala eventually came to know as “Uncle Aubrey.” “They were intimidatingly smart. They had a determined kind of posture about them.” The people close to Kamala Harris’s parents were never Black Panthers. But they did embrace an embryonic version of the philosophy that later came to be known as “Black Power”: black pride, black autonomy and the creation of black political and cultural institutions. According to Labrie, Shyamala Gopalan was the original study group’s only non-black member — the exception that proved the rule.
At one “peaceful” march, Harris writes, her mom and dad were “attacked by police with hoses”; she’s almost certainly referring to the events of May 14, 1960, the day San Francisco police officers used high-pressure fire hoses to clear out of City Hall’s cavernous rotunda dozens of clean-cut Berkeley students who had come to oppose a hearing of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
In the story that Harris tells about herself, this is the spirit she inherited from Berkeley and carried with her when she left at age 12, bound for Montreal, where her mother had accepted a job teaching at McGill University. Harris often tells a joke about a time she fussed as a toddler. “What do you want?” her mother asked.It’s an effective line — a quick and easy way to assert her street cred and undercut her reputation for caution and calculation.
Sakai first encountered Harris during LEOP orientation in 1986, where, sitting in the last row of the auditorium, she struck him as a “very quiet individual.” But Harris would soon defy Sakai’s expectations. First, she ran for and won the presidency of the Black Law Students Association in her second year; her initial reserve, Sakai realized, was really just an expression of her “very intense, very inquisitive” personality.
While radicals were waging war on the authorities in Oakland, where gun-toting Black Panthers patrolled the streets, “monitoring” the local police, Berkeley chose a different path. There, activists were increasingly becoming the authorities. In 1967, a black anti-war socialist named Ron Dellums was persuaded to run, reluctantly, for the city council; three years later, Dellums unseated the district’s longtime Democratic congressman.
If you had to pinpoint the moment when Harris first started to develop an awareness of politics, this would be it: when Berkeley became one of the only places in America where activists had figured out how to elbow their way into “the room where the decisions are being made,” as she likes to put it today.
And so, as the Atlantic’s Michelle Cottle recently pointed out, Harris’s “demographic identity has always been radical.” She was the first woman, black, and Asian American district attorney in San Francisco and attorney general of California, and only the second black woman ever to be elected to the United States Senate.
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