Plenty of eyes are now on VP Kamala Harris, waiting to see what she will accomplish after she made history as the first woman, Black person and Asian person to become vice president.
“I think it was an extraordinary moment in American history,” said Dr. Peniel Joseph, a history and public affairs professor at UT Austin and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.
Now the pressure is on the new vice president to be more than just an inspirational symbol of progress.
“It’s really hugely important symbolically, and substantively,” said Dr. Joseph, who like many expects big things from Harris.
Joseph says now she must match the breakthrough with bold action.
“Democracy is fragile, it’s a garden that we have to keep watering, we have to keep cultivating, we have to keep replenishing with truth, by speaking truth to power. And I think Kamala Harris represents generations of Black women and men who struggled and who really believed in American democracy and who really loved this country, even when this country stubbornly refused to love us back.”
Professor Joseph says Harris stands on the shoulders of many who have come before her, and she has shown a keen awareness of the pressures and responsibilities of being the first.
While he agrees that the country needs to end what Biden called an “uncivil war,” that does not mean overlooking the harms that have been done to marginalized communities.
“We have been in this uncivil war that does feature violence, death, punishment, incarceration, real hatred. But it also features these big lies – lies about black demonization, lies about the criminalization of whole populations, lies about immigrants, lies about Jews and the uptick in anti-Semitism, lies about the LGBTQIA, the queer community, the trans community. And we’ve got to push back against that, to say that we’re all Americans.”
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