Ahead of being sworn in as the 49th Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris reflected on the legacy of her mother, who emigrated from India, and the hard work of generations of women to achieve equal rights.
She tweeted a video, replaying the speech she made just after she was elected as the country’s vice president.
Speaking of her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, to who she attributed her success, she said:
"I am thinking about her, and about the generations of women – Black women, Asian, White, Latina, Native American women – who throughout our nation's history have paved the way for this moment tonight," Harris said.
Harris was born in Oakland in 1964 to an Indian mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer scientist, and a Jamaican father, Donald Harris, an economics professor at Stanford University.
In 1998, after graduating from Brown University and getting her law degree from the University of California, Harris joined the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, where she was made in-charge of the Career Criminal Unit.
In 2003, she was selected as the district attorney of the city and county of San Francisco.
With this election victory in 2020, Harris becomes the nation’s first Black and South Asian vice president, as well as the first woman to hold that office.
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