Black History Month: Kamala Harris

This year for #BlackHistoryMonth I’m going to celebrate a different person each day. Sometimes they will be people that most of us have heard of, sometimes they may be people very few of us have heard of. Each have created or achieved something that taught me, moved me, changed me, filled me.

It’s pretty simple: When this 2020 primary race began I had #MyTop5, and I was pretty dedicated to NOT narrowing down to a single candidate any time soon. I knew it was a very long road to the first primary, and a lot could happen, and I didn’t want to get my heart broken.

Kamala Harris was in that top 5. She is my Senator, and I’d watched her in action on a variety of Senatorial committee hearings. Smart and badass, no doubt.

When she decided to run I had a propensity to support her. As people brought up criticisms of her record and dismissed her as “a cop,” I both read a lot of stories about the history and context and talked to a couple of friends of mine who were more personally connected to criminal justice reform efforts in our state.

I felt like bottom line she was being held to a double standard AND that people were missing the nuance of certain situations frequently cited AND like people were missing all the reforms and improvements that happened on her watch AND like she was being erased and marginalized AND…