We imagine her now as Captain America, Liberty Leading the Revolution, the Statue of Liberty bearing the torch of the Enlightenment to vanquish the dark legacies of our history; theocracy, patriarchy, white supremacy. All these images and more I have seen and shared on social media, as a nation greets her as a savior with rapture and exaltation. Like Anne Hathaway’s White Queen, we have cried to the heavens, Where is my champion? And now, in future President Kamala Harris, we have our answer.
I hope she will be a President who embodies both Arundati Roy as a truth teller and the Black warrior matriarchs who led the Jamaican Revolt against the British Empire. I’m willing to give her the chance to find that voice, and I now ask the same of all of you.
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Questions remain; if we stand with her, will she stand with us when they come for us, as the enforcers of normality, authorized identities of sex and gender, of race and faith, and of who is an American and who decides, will always do?
Will she stand with the innocent, regardless of their faith or ethnicity, in both Israel and Palestine and throughout the world?
Will future President Kamala Harris help us to unite in solidarity and overcome division as guarantors of each other’s rights, and become human together?
In the ambiguous, relative, and shifting ground of struggle that is identity and politics as how we choose to be human together, is Kamala Harris our liberator or an overseer of the carceral state? And like ourselves, to what degree is she both?
As I wrote in my post of August 12 2020, Will the Real Kamala Harris Please Stand Up?; Congratulations to the first Indian-African Vice Presidential candidate in American history, and a Progressive whose Senatorial voting record is a near perfect match with Bernie’s. This is a moment of triumph for our nation.
Yes, she has a history as an overseer of the carceral state who positioned herself as a tough on crime Prosecuting Attorney, but she also nearly knocked Biden out of the race with her devastating personal witness to the effects of segregation and called Biden out on his record as an antibussing collaborator of white supremacy.
Biden has chosen his own minder in choosing his most effective opponent as a running mate, much as Lincoln formed his cabinet of opponents to create diversity of opinion, a stark contrast to Trump’s echo chamber. I didn’t think him capable of such boldness of vision; this is the first time I’ve ever thought Biden might be a President worth supporting.
And Kamala Harris, whatever her ideological alignment, is a warrior we can trust to fight to the last and with every available resource, by any means necessary, against the enormous forces of patriarchy and racism which have seized our nation in their fascist Republican dominion and regime of tyranny and terror.
In defending our interests as an inclusive and diverse society she will be defending her own; this I trust if nothing else. This is why its important to have leaders with skin in the game.
Yet there remain for me epistemic doubts regarding the historical Kamala Harris, as Richard Whately wrote of Napoleon in 1819. Which one is real?
The heroic Kamala Harris whose courageous stand on principle against the death penalty and the entire united Democratic and Republican establishment and law enforcement community became a Trial of Saint Joan and a showdown with the powerful Diane Feinstein, a victory in which she won her party over to her side and stopped the institution of state murder?
Or the Chief Inquisitor who used the power of her office to pursue a campaign of brutality and repression against a vulnerable community, incarcerated lesbian and trans women and LGBT people in general? Considering the centrality of our rights of conscience and bodily autonomy to democracy as a free society of equals, the absolute last thing we want is a state which authorizes identities of sex and gender and polices desire.
Within each of us lives both Saint Joan and the Chief Inquisitor; a titanic struggle of forces of repression and revolution which has been interrogated by Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, Franz Kafka in The Trial, George Bernard Shaw in Saint Joan, Alexander Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Arthur Miller in Resurrection Blues, and Manuel Puig in Kiss of the Spider Woman, among others.
It seems we are fated to watch this conflict played out on the stage of our nation’s history, and to play our parts in it, as the epochal reckoning of racial justice grapples with the armed might of white supremacist and fascist state terror and tyranny.
Abolition of the death penalty and the criminalization of the LGBT community; these are but two of many conflicted positions and ideologically incoherent actions which are strewn along the path of Kamala Harris to the White House, like breadcrumbs in a fairy tale or Ariadne’s Thread. But do they lead from the lair of a monster she has vanquished as a warning, or to her own lair where she waits in ambush for America?
We have taken the bait, and we will see.
In a less hopeful moment, when she first appeared on my horizon and the national stage and in the context of the horrific re-enslavement of Black citizens as prison bond labor and her record as a Prosecutor of Black men on frivolous drug charges which she has subsequently laughed about, I wrote this in my post of December 6 2019, The Failure of Kamala Harris and the Police State; As the chief prosecuting attorney for the state of California, Kamala Harris held a key position in the police state’s reign of terror and racist campaign of genocide against nonwhite Americans, the militarization of our police and the counterinsurgency model of policing which authorizes secrecy, surveillance, and the unlimited use of force against our citizens as if all suspected criminals were terrorists, and the enforcement of the prison bond labor system designed to re-enslave Black people after the Civil War.
She both used her position to reform a flawed and evil system in her historic confrontation with Diane Feinstein and the power brokers of the Democratic Party which ended capital punishment in California, and collaborated with it as systemic oppression and white supremacist terror. And this bears questioning.
Is Kamala Harris a traitor to the egalitarian values of America exactly the same as the overseer who kept fellow slaves in line with a whip? Or a liberator who in ending the death penalty has championed us all? And to what degree is she both of these, like all who are human?
She played an important role in calling out the amoral and despicable patriarch and racist Biden on his record, an act which changed the nature of the Democratic debates and perhaps the direction of our politics forever, and for this historic moment of liberation we must cherish her.
But we must not allow her or any who claim to speak for us an unexamined mandate.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
So I wrote of her five years ago in her role as Prosecuting Attorney and overseer of the carceral state, and as a figure comparable to Javert in Les Miserables. But if this is true, it is also true that she used her position as apex predator of an unjust system to infiltrate, subvert, and transform the American justice system, and ended the death penalty in California by her heroic personal stand, a campaign of liberation which could easily have destroyed her but instead catapulted her to greatness and the national arena.
Humans are never simply good or bad, heroes or villains, white hats or black hats, and never beyond redemption; we are all ambiguities of darkness and light, and in this our flawed humanity Kamala Harris represents us well. Just ask anyone who has ever been undercover in an enemy organization, as I now understand her career in law enforcement as a partial truth balanced with that of a co-opted enforcer of unequal power.
My understanding of Kamala Harris began to change during the 2020 Vice Presidential debate versus Pence, when I first realized her potential as a champion of women, nonwhite humans, and other precariats of systemic oppression.
As I wrote in my post of October 8 2020, Kamala Harris Attempts Exorcism of Zombie Slave of Beelzebub Pence; What struck me about the Vice Presidential Debate was Kamala’s image control; eye contact, smiles, empathy statements, and a physical presence and semiotics designed to be nonthreatening, full of sympatico and mother will protect you cues, as contrasted with Pence’s I am zombie daddy fear me grimacing and remoteness.
Upon reflection I realized that I was witnessing a fairytale; one of a very specific kind, which like that promulgated by Disney in the recent film Maleficent which interrogates the sublimation of female power to the service of the state and valorizes its seizures of power versus systems of oppression as liberation struggle.
Tonight we witnessed a cage match between Patriarchy and the equality and autonomy of women, with a sideshow of neo-Confederate racism versus racial justice and equality. And the champions of light and darkness stood in a chiaroscuro of stark figural relief.
Kamala Harris embodies both my hopes and my fears for America and the future of humankind. I hope Kamala is a cross between Arundhati Roy and the Black Jamaican warrior matriarchs who led the fight against the British Empire. But I fear she may be an overseer of the carceral state.
Pence is a monster, a zombie and slave of Beelzebub who claimed him before the stage of the world as a rotting and soulless thing, perching on his Harry Potter villain waxy and leering head as Pence mumbled patriarchal Gideonite fundamentalist boilerplate unrelated to any real questions put to him, champion of plutocratic wealth versus humanity, state power versus liberty, white supremacist terror versus equality, and most especially misogyny over the autonomy of women.
As David Frum writes in The Atlantic; “We saw a vice president with a pale face, his mouth cankered by a cold sore, his eyes pink. He looked unwell, which evoked the pandemic that has gripped America—a pandemic through which the Trump White House has modeled the most irresponsible and unsafe behavior. That irresponsible and unsafe behavior has sickened the president and the first lady, forced the Joint Chiefs of Staff into quarantine, and spread infection though the West Wing. This White House is notorious for non-transparency and untruthfulness. The president evaded a COVID-19 test before the September 29 debate in Cleveland—a date by which he very probably knew he was infected and infectious. Everybody watching tonight’s debate had to wonder: What’s going on with the vice president?
We saw a vice president who had internalized the Trump White House’s culture of disrespect, and especially disrespect to women. He talked over Kamala Harris and the moderator, Susan Page; he ignored the rules of the debate to which he agreed. At the core of the Trump political project is the reassertion of dominance over the historically dominated by the historically dominant. That reassertion of dominance was Pence’s supreme project at this debate too. Pence did not imitate his boss’s manic and undisciplined—and ultimately catastrophically unsuccessful—style of dominance. Instead, he brought to this debate the more measured and controlled disdain of a man who had considered the matter carefully—and decided that the woman in front of him had no right to control him and that the woman to his right did not deserve to be onstage with him.
We saw a weird moment when a fly landed on Pence’s snow-white hair—and the vice president did not react at all. No doubt, it’s a conundrum, what to do in such a situation. If Pence had shooed the fly and the fly had refused to shoo, that would have been bad. So he did nothing. And that doing nothing somehow in one powerful visual moment concentrated everything. It symbolized the whole Pence vice presidency, the determined, willful refusal to acknowledge the most blaring and glaring negative realities. Through all of the scandals and the crimes and the disasters of the past four years, Mike Pence was the man who pretended not to notice. And now there was a fly on his head, and he pretended not to notice that too.”
In this one thing we can be sure; Kamala Harris will never ignore the demon perched on America’s head or the patriarchal and white supremacist legacies of our history.
This does not mean that she is any different or better than any one of us, for we all bear the flaws of our humanity and are embedded in systems of oppression and the brokenness of the world. If I react with shock and outrage when our heroes are proven to be no better than ourselves and subject to failures of vision and empathy, it is because on the whole their acts are better than my expectations, and I must always re-evaluate my own ideas on an ongoing basis, especially when things do not fit in the pegboards of my schema and paradigms. Usually when this happens, it is because I have only partial information, in a realm of ideas which are occluded, confused, falsified, relative, and context-dependent. For example, there is the horrible message Kamala gave to the huddled masses yearning to be free at our border; “Do not come.”
As I wrote in my post of June 9 2021, Overseer of the Carceral State Kamala Harris Proclaims Her Solution to the Humanitarian Refugee Crisis at Our Border; “Do Not Come”; Kamala Harris embodies my hopes and fears for the future of America; I hope she is a cross between Arundati Roy and the Jamaican warrior matriarchs who led the slave rebellion against the British Empire; but I fear she may be an overseer of the carceral state.
Today my darkest fears have been given new force by her speech to the “huddled masses yearning to be free”, as the poem by a Jewish girl on our Stature of Liberty proclaims. Former Prosecuting Attorney and instrument of law and order, force, fear, and the brutal tyranny of elite wealth and power and hierarchies of racial exclusivity, now wielding the authority of the Vice President of the United States, fails us all and betrays our trust in a stunning message to the world; “do not come”.
Not the poetic vision of an America which is a beacon of hope to the world, as written by Emma Lazarus;
“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Kamala Harris could have simply quoted the magisterial poem which illuminates America’s historic mandate as a guarantor of universal human rights and the equality of all souls, could have spoken to the fear and pain of the wretched of the earth who have come to us for safety and for liberty, could have offered hope for the flaws of our humanity and the brokenness of the world.
And this is all the wisdom and empathy she has to offer us from her secret heart; “Do not come.”
Is Kamala an apologist of imperialism, abysmally ignorant, or just without moral vision?
This is an easy charge to lay at her door when I do not live in her skin, know the information she had when making this decision, or the context in which it was made; neither can I excuse failures of empathy and solidarity with human beings who are different from ourselves, for our differences should mean nothing.
For what purpose have we a border? We have drawn a line in the sand to exploit disparity and create illegal migrant labor; an invisible resource of those with no legal existence to whom we can do anything without reprisal, and whose cheap labor fuels vast industries of agriculture, hospitality, caretaking, and manufacture.
Migrant labor is slave labor.
This is the system of wealth, power, and privilege which our chosen champion has refused to challenge, and aligned herself instead with those who would enslave us.
Yet the betrayal of the people by Kamala Harris is neither the most central nor most sad issue driving the dynamics of elite hegemony and imperial dominion whose flaws can be read in the suffering of the masses at our border, for we ourselves have designed the failures which are their true cause.
As I wrote in my post of February 18 2020, Guatemala: Our Heart of Darkness; As we abduct and lockdown refugees in concentration camps and secret prisons, and drive others back into a Mexico whose government is supine before the power of its criminal organizations, we must reflect on the causes of this historic mass migration from Central America’s Dry Corridor of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua; why is this happening, and what can be done to fix the problems which are driving it?
Drought and famine caused by global warming and climate change are clear immediate causes and triggering stressors of the current migration. These conditions have worsened longstanding issues of endemic poverty and pervasive violence and criminality, legacies of historical colonialism and American imperialist and capitalist policies and interventions, which I have described in my post of September 4 2019; “ There is an interesting connection between the chaos we created in Central America which is driving a mass exodus of immigration to our borders and the conspiracy theory of Islamic replacement of Europeans which inspires our greatest terrorist threat today; many of the white supremacists who ruled Algeria as a colony of France, mainly former Nazi soldiers who joined the Foreign Legion after the end of World War Two, were after its fall in 1962 hired by the government of the United States to rule El Salvador and Guatemala as puppet regimes to protect our corporate profits.
With them came the same ideology and dream of a homeland and asylum for escaped Nazis, and a secure base of operations and launchpoint for the Fourth Reich, as with those who fled the fall of the colony of Algeria as a white ethnostate to France and blamed Charles de Gaulle for its abandonment, and whose descendants now form the core of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.
Among the direct effects of the secret partnership between America and our former Nazi adversaries include:
The 1954 seizure of Guatemala by Eisenhower’s CI.A., which replaced a Marxist who had seized land owned by United Fruit and redistributed it to Indian peasants with a furniture salesman from Honduras, Castillo Armas. During the course of this coup America bombed Guatemala City, killed 9,000 communists, disbanded the unions, drove off the squatters, drew up a blacklist of some 70,000 leftists, built death squads and secret prisons, gave torture and brigandage free reign, created an enduring political front, the MLN, and started making a profit from our plantations.
The 1961 seizure of Guatemala by C.I.A. officer Willauer leading 200 men, a Harvard lawyer who had flown as Chennault’s first officer with the Flying Tigers in China. Guatemala was the staging area for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Throughout the 1960-63 period of a civil war which continued until 1996, America crushed a pro-Castro rebellion using six C.I.A. bombers, exiled Cuban shock troops, and Green Berets who used the opportunity to test counterinsurgency theories later used in Vietnam.
The 1974 accession of an officer of Armas named Alarcon to the Presidency of Guatemala, who institutionalized the MLN, declaring “I am a fascist, and I have tried to model my party on the Spanish Falange.” He was, of course, a C.I.A. agent. Nixon once brought him along on his annual pilgrimage to consult with what he called his spiritual advisor, the infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.
The 1982 seizure of power and Presidency of Rios Montt, an evangelical Sunday school teacher and personal friend of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who suspended the constitution, replaced the courts with secret tribunals, escalated the scorched earth warfare, torture, and disappearances of his predecessors, and one thing more. Here we see the designs of the Christian Identity Gideonite fundamentalists for America and the world given free reign.
During this the most terrible period of civil war throughout Central America, when Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were in fact a single nation ruled by remnants of the Nazis we had transplanted from French Algeria as American puppet regimes, and with the full authority of Ronald Reagan, Rios Montt weaponized Protestantism against encroaching Catholic Liberation theology.
During the 18 months of the Mayan Genocide, in which his death squads killed 3,000 people each month and annihilated 600 villages, he also instituted a system of forced labor in concentration camps modeled on the Apartheid system of South Africa and ruled by terror using former British police and Protestant Orange Militia units hired from Belfast, a mercenary force who had splendidly legal Hong Kong passports courtesy of the Thatcher government.
During over 35 years of civil war in Guatemala including Rios Montt’s genocidal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the native Indians, about half a million Indians were killed, over one million conscripted into military service and used against their own people, tens of thousands driven into Mexico as refugees, and most of the rest worked to death in the concentration camps. No American Army came to liberate them; they were not white, and no one cared so long as the profits flowed. Guatemala is America’s Belgian Congo; our heart of darkness.
I think of this every day as I eat my morning banana, for each one is the living form of a silent cry, the ghost of a tear, the memory of atrocity and horror, a thing like many others of fragile beauty and fleeting pleasure won by brutality and the theft of hope, pain and blood and death made manifest. For the dead and for wrongs past I can do nothing; it is the living who must be avenged and the future that must be redeemed.
The 1981 founding of ARENA in El Salvador and the 1982-3 Presidency of Roberto D’Aubuisson Arrieta, son of one of the original French Algerian OAS/Afrika Corps legionnaires and immigrants and leader of death squads since 1972, when he was trained at the US School of the Americas, often called a school for war criminals. During the peak of the civil war in 1983-84, about 8,000 people were killed every month in El Salvador.
The 1963-75 Honduran coup and military dictatorship of Arellano, for whose regime the term Banana Republic was coined, and of course the conduct of the Contra War beginning in 1980, which included the 1984 Honduran invasion of Nicaragua supported by 5,500 American troops.
Together Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were ruled for over a generation by America through our puppet tyrants and the ARENA and MLN parties we created. But there is more; much more, of which I will mention only four more brief examples here.
The 1964-85 rule of Brazil by the Arena Party and its legacy of torture and state terror which was ended by the total bankruptcy of the nation.
The 1976 military coup in Argentina and the civil war which followed, during which some 20,000 persons were disappeared. Of our earlier involvements; Peron had been a protégé of Franco and Mussolini, and Evita was assassinated not by us but by Vatican Intelligence with radiation poisoning due to Peron’s campaign against the Church. The Vatican also ran the Swiss escape route used by Otto Skorzeny and other SS officers at the fall of the Third Reich whom we later hired. The most brazen flattery I have ever heard directed toward Oliver North was to compare him to Skorzeny.
The 1973 assassination of Allende in Chile and support of the Pinochet regime which killed as many as one in every hundred of its citizens.
Regarding Mexico, we long ago seized Texas and California, drew a line in the sand, and now call aliens everyone on the wrong side of it who comes here to pick the fruit, wash the dishes, and clean the toilets that our own nephews and nieces, children and grandchildren, would laugh in your face at the suggestion they get their hands dirty doing themselves.
Fascism is a sin of pride whose effects reverberate still, propagating outward in ever-widening circles as a force of contagion like the ripples of a stone cast into a pond. And we are all complicit in it, who call ourselves Americans.
We must make a better future than we have the past, and offer better solutions than to echo Marie Antionette’s dismissive and fatal reference “Let them eat cakes” in the imperious proclamation “Do not come”.
So for the darkness of Kamala Harris, who in becoming a Prosecuting Attorney accepted a Faustian bargain with the state, and whose comfortableness in the role of an enforcer of law and order and of a carceral state of force and control made of armed white supremacist police terror, prisons, borders, universal surveillance, and systems of oppression designed to enslave nonwhite populations in service to our elite white male hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege I am most uncomfortable.
Now for the light of Kamala Harris, for all human beings are a chiaroscuro of darkness and light in equal measure; she has not remained as she began, and with her growth and change as a champion of liberty and of the powerless, of women and of nonwhite people, my idea of her changed also.
In the wake of her visit with Netanyahu and his address to Congress as a key ally of Trump and the Party of Treason, she said in a speech; “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies [in Gaza]. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.” This is the first time the voice of the Democratic Party or of America has tacitly admitted our nation’s historical and ongoing complicity in genocide, and it changes forever the narrative. This is both wonderful for our human rights and clever strategically as politics; let the Republicans own genocide as well as racism and theocratic patriarchy. It is also a change in Harris’ position from defender of state tyranny and terror to defender of its victims.
Why do I revile and abjure the state as embodied violence and its institutions of law and order? Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
In the end, all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.
As I wrote in my post of August 12 2021, Anniversary of Kamala Harris Becoming a Vice Presidential Candidate; A year ago today something unique in American history happened; in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protests and the battles in our streets against white supremacist terror and police violence, California’s apex predator of the carceral state and most ferociously brilliant law and order attorney was chosen by Biden as his partner in dethroning fascism and the Restoration of America. Kamala Harris placed her life in the balance with those of the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, at the head of the mass actions against the police and the system she had served, and took her place in history as a figure of Liberty and a symbol of our hope for a better future.
This I greeted with deep ambivalence, disturbed by her conflicted history and uncertain of her intentions in using the power she had been given in the performance of her new role. Kamala Harris embodies my hopes and fears for the Democratic Party and the future of America; I hope that she is a combination of Arundhati Roy, India’s greatest literary figure and champion of Socialism, and the Jamaican warrior matriarchs who led the fight against the British Empire and birthed the nation which produced the people’s poet Bob Marley, but I fear she may be an overseer of the carceral state.
A year later I am no closer to resolving this dichotomous image, but the meaning of Kamala Harris as a figure and symbol of racial and gender equality is unambiguous, and this I celebrate as a historic victory.
We must free ourselves from the shadows of our history and its legacies of epigenetic and systemic inequalities and harms which we drag behind us like an invisible reptilian tail, and emerge as a United Humankind into the light of a brave new world of possibilities.
References
Javert sings This I Swear By the Stars, Les Misérables
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24280.Les_Mis_rables?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=MrZIDUIDNq&rank=1
Rashom*on, film by Akira Kurosawa
https://ok.ru/video/4578165656154
Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Jay Rubin Translator), Haruki Murakami (Introduction), Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Illustrator)
Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte, Richard Whately
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
Arundhati Roy author page on Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/6134.Arundhati_Roy
A monster who protects us from other monsters: the idea of the state as embodied violence in the figure of Maleficent, and of seizures of power from patriarchal systems of oppression in liberation struggle; always an inherent duality, tyranny and liberty, the violence of the slavemaster and the violence of the slave in breaking his chains
Who will step forward to be our champion? Alice in Wonderland
Who is Kamala Harris? A reading list
Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig
Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes & an Epilogue, George Bernard Shaw
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/727045.Saint_Joan?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_33
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4934.The_Brothers_Karamazov?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_22
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17125.One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_38
Resurrection Blues: A Prologue and Two Acts, Arthur Miller
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/179131.Resurrection_Blues?ref=nav_sb_ss_3_18
The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text (The Schocken Kafka Library) by Franz Kafka
Kamala Harris’ favorite books; want to understand her and how she imagines, constructs, and performs herself? Read these:
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11334.Song_of_Solomon?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_32
Native Son, by Richard Wright
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15622.Native_Son?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_29
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/77203.The_Kite_Runner?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_36
The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7763.The_Joy_Luck_Club?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_30
Sources and References on the Harris identities as a ground of struggle, conflicted, relational, and changing in the historical forces of the moment, and her meaning as a defining figure and shaping force for our future
‘So uniquely her’: where did Kamala Harris’s self-help speaking style come from?
Kamala Harris’s record as California prosecutor hurt her 2020 campaign. Will 2024 be different?
‘We have arrived!’ What the rise of Kamala Harris and Indian American politicians means for America
Harris navigates Netanyahu visit – podcast
Kamala Harris says ‘I will not be silent’ on suffering in Gaza after Netanyahu talks
Uncommitted voters who protested Biden over Gaza ‘need to see action’ from Harris: Movement that used the Democratic primaries to voice opposition wants more than empathy for Palestinians from the vice-president
Barack Obama endorses Kamala Harris for president in 2024 US election:
Former president’s endorsem*nt means US vice-president has won backing of all the party’s high-profile figures
This Is Who I’d Like to See Fighting for Us for the Next Four Years…, by
MICHAEL MOORE
“If at any time during the next 102 days you feel like you need a little pick-me-up, or you’ve sunk into an existential crisis wondering “Why am I here knocking on doors when I know this is all hopeless?” or you realize that “all these Quinnipiac polls are bullsh*t — BUT WHAT IF THEY’RE RIGHT AND WE’RE ALL DOOMED?!” And then your sister calls to say that your brother-in-law has changed his mind and IS, in fact, going to vote for Trump — and, for you, THAT is the final straw. “I’m outta here, I’m moving to Moose Jaw.”
But, then… all of a sudden, a voice in your head says, “Wait! Hold on… pull up that clip Michael Moore sent you!” And then… you hit play…”
Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From An American
July 23, 2024
“Vice President Kamala Harris continues her momentum toward the 2024 presidential election since President Joe Biden’s surprise announcement on Sunday that he would not accept the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.
Today more than 350 national security leaders endorsed Harris for president, noting that if elected president, “she would enter that office with more significant national security experience than the four Presidents prior to President Biden.” As vice president, she “has met with more than 150 world leaders and traveled to 21 countries,” the authors wrote, and they called out her work across the globe from her work strengthening partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region to her historic trip to Africa and her efforts to expand U.S. relationships with nations in the Caribbean and North Central America. In contrast to Harris, the letter said, “Trump is a threat to America’s national security.”
Those signing the letter included former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, national security advisors Susan Rice and Thomas Donilon, former secretaries of defense Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, and former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.
In a New York Times op-ed today, former secretary of state Clinton praised Biden for his “decision to end his campaign,” which she called “as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime.” She went on to say that Vice President Harris “represents a fresh start for American politics,” offering a vision of an America with its best days ahead of it and, rather than “old grievances,” “new solutions.”
Clinton noted that her own political campaigns had seen her burned in effigy, but said, “It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible” and that Americans cannot overcome sexism and racism. After all, she pointed out, voters elected Black American Barack Obama in 2008, and she herself won the popular vote in 2016. “[A]bortion bans and attacks on democracy are galvanizing women voters like never before,” Clinton wrote, and “[w]ith Ms. Harris at the top of the ticket leading the way, this movement may become an unstoppable wave.”
Today, Harris held her first campaign rally, speaking to supporters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Republicans held their national convention just last week. The energy from the 3000 people packed into the gym where she walked out to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” was palpable.
She began by thanking Biden and touting his record, then turned to noting that in her past as a prosecutor, California attorney general, U.S. senator from California, and vice president, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds—predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So,” she said, “hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” She went on to remind the audience that Trump ran a for-profit college that scammed students, was found liable for committing sexual abuse, and “was just found guilty of fraud on 34 counts.”
While Trump is relying on “billionaires and big corporations,” she said, “we are running a people-powered campaign” and “will be a people-first presidency.” The Democrats, she said, “believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead; a future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every worker has the freedom to join a union; where every person has affordable health care, affordable childcare, and paid family leave. We believe in a future where every senior can retire with dignity.”
“[A]ll of this is to say,” she continued, “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. Because…when our middle class is strong, America is strong.”
In contrast, she said, Trump wants to take the country backward. She warned that he and his Project 2025 will “weaken the middle class,” cutting Social Security and Medicare and giving “tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations,” while “working families foot the bill.” “They intend to end the Affordable Care Act,” she said, “and take us back…to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions…. Remember what that was like? Children with asthma, women who survived breast cancer, grandparents with diabetes. America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back. We’re not going back.”
“[O]urs is a fight for the future,” she said “And it is a fight for freedom…. Generations of Americans before us led the fight for freedom. And now…the baton is in our hands.”
Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans are still scrambling for a plan of attack against Harris. One of their first angles has been the sexism and racism Clinton predicted, calling her “a DEI hire.” House Republican leaders have told fellow lawmakers to dial back the sexist and racist attacks.”
July 25, 2024
“Momentum continues to build behind Vice President Kamala Harris to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and the national narrative as a whole has shifted.
Democrats appear to be generating significant enthusiasm among younger Americans. Yesterday, for the first time in their history, the March for Our Lives organization endorsed a presidential candidate: Kamala Harris. Students from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, organized March for Our Lives after the shooting there in 2018. Executive director Natalie Fall said that the organization “will work to mobilize young people across the country to support Vice President Harris and other down-ballot candidates, with a particular focus on the states and races where we can make up the margin of victory—in Arizona, New York, Michigan, and Florida.”
Andrea Hailey of Vote.org announced that in the 48 hours after President Biden said he would not accept the Democratic nomination, nearly 40,000 people registered to vote. That meant a daily increase in new registrations of almost 700%.
People are turning out for Harris in impressive numbers. In the hours after she launched her campaign, Win With Black Women rallied 44,000 Black women on Zoom and raised $1.6 million. On Monday, around 20,000 Black men rallied to raise $1.2 million. Tonight, challenged to “answer the call,” 164,000 white women joined an event that “broke Zoom” and raised more than $2 million and tens of thousands of new volunteers.
Another significant endorsem*nt for Harris came yesterday from Geoff Duncan, the Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, who wrote on social media: “I’m committed to beating Donald Trump. The only vehicle left for me to do that with is the Democratic Party. If that requires me to vote for, speak for, or endorse [Kamala Harris] then count me in!” Duncan’s public announcement offers permission for other Georgia Republicans to make a similar shift. In 1964, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond similarly paved the way for southern Democrats to vote for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
Harris’s appearances are generating such enthusiasm from audiences that when she delivered the keynote address this morning at the convention of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, Texas, the applause delayed her ability to begin. After a speech defending education and calling out the cuts to it in Project 2025, Harris ended by demonstrating that after decades of Democrats being accused of being anti-American, Trump’s denigration of the country has enabled the party to claim the position of being America’s defenders.
“When we vote, we make our voices heard,” Harris said. “So today, I ask you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win! God bless you and God bless the United States of America.”
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