Kamla Harris is an American Politician and Attorney who is the 49th and current vice president of the United States as well as the first female vice president and the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, as well as the first African American and first Asian American vice president. She is a member of the democratic party. Further, she has served as the attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017 and as a United States senator representing California from 2017 to 2021. She became vice president upon being inaugurated in January 2021 alongside President Joe Biden, having defeated the incumbent president, Donald Trump, and vice president, Mike Pence, in the 2020 election. Born on 20th October 1964, Kamala Devi Harris is from Oakland, California, the USA. The 5 ft 2 in, Harris completed her bachelor’s degree from Howard University, Washington D.C and studied in the University of California Hastings College of the Law and obtained her J.D. Later, she was admitted to California State Bar in 1990. She began her career from the year 1990 as a deputy district attorney to the year 1998. She has also carried the San Francisco City Attorney’s Division for the three years on Families and Children. She made history as she was the first woman, black and south Asian to achieve the San Francisco district attorney in 2003. Also, she was awarded the Thurgood Marshall Award and the Aspen Institute offered her to serve as a Rodel Fellow. She has been a proud member of the resistance against Trump’s presidency. As of 2021, the net worth of Kamala Harris is $7 Million. She is also active in social media with more than 16 million followers on her Instagram account (@kamalaharris), more than 19 million followers on her Twitter account (@KamalaHarris), and more than 5 million followers on her Facebook account. Here are the 10 things that you didn’t know about Kamala Harris:
Source: @sfgate
Everything You Need To Know About Kamala Harris
1. Kamala Harris is multiracial as her ancestry is Indian-Jamaican
Kamala Harris was born in California on 20th October 1964 with the birth name of Kamala Devi Harris to Indian American immigrant and breast cancer researcher, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan and Jamaica-born Donald J. Harris, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford. Her parents met as doctoral students at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1962 and married the following year. “I came to study at UC Berkeley. I never came to stay,” Gopalan told a reporter for SF Weekly in 2003. “It’s the old story: I fell in love with a guy, we got married, pretty soon kids came.” The couple later divorced in 1972, and Gopalan raised Harris and her younger sister Maya. Thus, Kamala Harris has Tamil ancestry on her mother’s side and Jamaican ancestry on her father’s side.
Source: @nytimes
2. Her Name Has A Meaning
The name of Kamala Devi Harris was chosen by her mother as a nod both to her Indian roots – Kamala means “lotus” and is another name for the Hindu goddess Lakshmi – and the empowerment of women. The vice president’s middle name, Devi, translates to “goddess” in Sanskrit, another tribute to the Hindu religion. “A culture that worships goddesses produces strong women,” the late Gopalan told the Los Angeles Times in 2004. She was originally named Kamala Iyer Harris by her parents, who two weeks later filled an affidavit by which her middle name was changed to Devi.
3. Harris went to Howard University
Kamala Harris attended and graduated from Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C. in 1986 with a degree in political science and economics. Moreover, she has also joined Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the first established Black Greek Letter Organization for women. “What you learn at an HBCU is you do not have to fit into someone’s limited perspective of what it means to be young, gifted and Black,” she said during a 2018 interview on Power 105’s syndicated radio show The Breakfast Club.
4. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s late son, Beau Biden were friends
Kamala Harris met and became friends with younger Biden, who died of brain cancer while Harris was California’s Attorney General, and Beau served in the same position for the State of Delaware, namely connecting over their work during the Great Recession of 2008 and the 2011 housing crisis. They developed a close friendship and worked together on issues, particularly those pertaining to the big banks following the financial crisis of 2008. “There were periods when I was taking the heat,” Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir, “when Beau and I talked every day, sometimes multiple times a day.” “I learned quickly that Beau was the kind of guy who inspired people to be a better version of themselves,” she said in a 2020 speech. “He really was the best of us. And when I would ask him, ‘Where’d you get that, where’d this come from?’ he always talked about his dad.” Judging by Kamala’s words, she’ll never forget the time she spent with Beau.
Source: @oprahdaily
Beau Biden suffered from ankylosing spondylitis, which he was diagnosed in 2001, after returning from service in Kosovo. For the final few years of his life, Biden suffered from a brain tumor. On 20th May 2015, he was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, because of a recurrence of brain cancer. He died there ten days later, on May 30, 2015, at the age of 46.
5. Kamala Harris loves to cook
Kamala has often expressed her love for cooking. “As a child, I remember hearing the pots and smelling the food, and kind of like someone in a trance, I would walk into the kitchen to see all this incredible stuff happening,” Harris says. “My mother used to tell me, ‘Kamala, you clearly like to eat good food. You better learn how to cook.'” One of Harris’s earliest “little specialties,” as she puts it, was scrambled eggs, which she perfected around the third grade and liked to top with cheese cut into the shape of a smiling face. The eggs remain one of the better metaphors for what Harris loves about cooking and food: She likes to feed people, to make them laugh, to bring them together around a table. She’s a little earnest about it! Isn’t that part of the fun? “It’s a gift that you can give people,” she says of cooking. “That’s how I was introduced to it.” Back in 2019, Kamala Harris shared her passion for south Indian food with actress Mindy Kaling, who, like the US Senator, has Indian roots. In a video posted on social media, the duo is seen cooking masala dosa at Mindy’s house. While the actress is impressed seeing Kamala’s fine chopping skills, the senator is in awe of the entire dosa-making process. Also in lockdown, she went live with popular chefs on Insta. She has also taught fellow senator Mark Warner how to properly make a tuna melt in an online video. When sharing her recipe for “Kamala’s Cornbread Dressing” on Thanksgiving 2020, she tweeted, “During difficult times I have always turned to cooking. This year, I wanted to share one of my family’s favorite Thanksgiving recipes with you. I hope whenever you’re able to make it in life, it brings you as much warmth as it has brought me — even when separated from those I love.” Her recipe books are Cookbooks by Marcella Hazan and Alice Water’s The Art of Simple Food.
Source: @timesofindia.indiatimes.com
6. She is a book lover as well as an author
Kamala Harris published her first book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer” in 2009, which focused on criminal justice reform. After a long gap, in 2019, she released an illustrated children’s book, “Superheroes Are Everywhere”, which was geared toward readers aged three to seven where she wrote about how heroism is more about choice and character than capes. “Heroes stand up for what is right. Who stands up for what is right in your life?” Also in the same year, she published her third book entitled “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey”. Whereas her favorite books include Native Son by Richard Wright, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.
7. Kamala Harris’s Step-Children call her ‘Momala’
On 22nd August 2014, Kamala Harris became Doug Emhoff’s as well as stepmom to Doug’s children, Cole and Ella (with film producer Kerstin Emhoff). Harris and the kids agreed they didn’t like the term “stepmom,” however, and instead came up with the name “Momala”. In a May 2019 Elle essay, Harris called Cole and Ella her “endless source of love and pure joy,” adding, “I can say one thing with certainty, my heart wouldn’t be whole, nor my life full, without them.” “Family is my husband, Doug, who I met on a blind date set up by my best friend,” she noted. “Family is our beautiful children, Cole and Ella, who call me ‘Momala.'” Formally nominating Harris alongside the senator’s niece Meena and sister Maya at the DNC, Ella sung the praises of her “Momala”. “To my brother and me, you’ll always be ‘Momala,’ the world’s greatest stepmom,” she said. “You’re a rock. Not just for our dad, but for three generations of our big, blended family.”
Source: @instagram.com/kamalaharris
8. Kamala Harris often wears her Converse Chuck shoes
On the campaign trail in 2020, Kamala Harris appeared in a pair of Converse Chuck Taylors. According to an interview with The Cut, she has deemed them her “airport sneakers” and has an entire collection of them. Her Chuck Taylor collection is large enough to match certain outfits and fit different weather conditions. Harris even has pairs reserved for when she doesn’t feel like tying her shoes that day. “I have a whole collection of Chuck Taylors: a black leather pair, a white pair, I have the kind that don’t lace, the kind that do lace, the kind I wear in the hot weather, the kind I wear in the cold weather, and the platform kind for when I’m wearing a pantsuit,” she told The Cut in 2018. During an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Harris’s husband, Douglass Emhoff, revealed that she even wore Chuck Taylors when she first met his kids, Cole and Ella. “The Kamala Harris I know wears Chucks and jeans,” he later tweeted. “And now you all know too! Her retro-style sneakers are accessible and familiar to people—regardless of their age, race, gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic status. “Whatever your background or whatever language your grandmother spoke, we all at some point or another had our Chucks, right?” Harris said during an interview with Complex.
Source: @popsugar
9. Kamala Harris won her U.S. Senate race in 2016
In the primary on June 7, 2016, California Attorney General Kamala Harris and U.S. Representative Loretta Sanchez, both Democrats, finished in first and second place, respectively, and contested the general election. In the general election, Harris defeated Sanchez in a landslide, carrying 54 of the state’s 58 counties, including Sanchez’s home county of Orange, although Sanchez held Harris to a margin of less than 1% in the Central Valley counties of Kern and Merced. Democrat Kamala Harris has beaten Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat, in the race for the California Senate seat which was held by Barbara Boxer.
Source: @huffpost.com
10. Kamala Harris and Barack Obama are longtime buddies
Harris has a long-lasting friendship with Barack Obama, who reportedly considered her for the Supreme Court and for his attorney general position; Obama was criticized for referring to Harris as the “best-looking attorney general in the country.”
Source: @financerewind
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