Kamala Harris made history in 2020 as the first Black woman elected as vice president of the United States, shattering barriers that have kept men—almost all of them white—entrenched at the highest levels of American politics for more than two centuries.
Making history
Today, she is one step closer to making history again.
On Sunday, July 21, President Joe Biden ended his bid for a second term amid concerns from within their party that he would be unable to defeat Republican Donald Trump.
Mr. Biden’s departure frees his delegates to vote for whomever they choose.
Ms. Harris, whom Mr. Biden backed after ending his candidacy, is thus far the only declared candidate. Should she secure the Democratic nomination, she would be the first Black woman to lead a major party ticket.
Few, if any, presidential candidates have had as much exposure to the world’s religions as Kamala Harris, the 59-year-old vice president from California.
Harris’ ethnic, racial and cultural biography represents a slice of the U.S. population that is becoming ascendant but that has never been represented in the nation’s highest office.
Harris and her faith
Here are five faith facts about Harris:
She was raised on Hinduism and Christianity.
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was from Chennai, India; her father, Donald Harris, from Jamaica. The two met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley.
Her name, Kamala, means “lotus” in Sanskrit, and is another name for the Hindu goddess Lakshmi. She visited India multiple times as a girl and got to know her relatives there.
But because her parents divorced when she was 7, she also grew up in Oakland and Berkeley attending predominantly Black churches.
Her downstairs neighbor, Regina Shelton, often took Kamala and her sister Maya to Oakland’s 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland. Harris now considers herself a Black Baptist.
She is married to a Jewish man.
Harris met her husband, Los Angeles lawyer Douglas Emhoff, on a blind date in San Francisco. They married in 2014. At their wedding, the couple smashed a glass to honor Emhoff’s upbringing (a traditional Jewish wedding custom).
It was Harris’ first marriage and his second.
An article in the Jewish press described her imitation of her Jewish mother-in-law, Barbara Emhoff, as “worthy of an Oscar.”
She was criticised for not proactively assisting in civil cases against Catholic clergy sex abuse during the years she served as a prosecutor.
After graduating from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, Harris specialized in prosecuting sex crimes and child exploitation as a young prosecutor.
But two investigations by The Intercept and The Associated Press found that Harris was consistently silent on the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal — first as San Francisco district attorney and later as California’s attorney general. Read more
- Yonat Shimron is an RNS National Reporter and Senior Editor.
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