![]() ![]() It was at Hastings that Harris became comfortable with pushing for greater recognition of marginalized communities within the law school and the legal profession - in part, by setting an example herself. While her work with BLSA, for instance, involved protest, it also put her in the room with school administrators. In interviews, former classmates and professors said that even though Harris pressed for change on campus, her activism always had an institutional flavor to it. 2, while also attempting to carve out her own political future. What happened to the changemaking instinct that Harris exhibited at Hastings? Her law school years - the era of Harris’ life that perhaps has gotten the least public scrutiny to date - offer a window into how she thinks about her role as a politician and a Black woman in politics as she navigates being Biden’s No. Instead, Harris herself at times has faced pushback from her own side of the aisle, for telling migrants not to come to the United States, for example, or failing to push harder for a minimum wage increase. Some voters hoped that, as vice president, she would be able to push her more moderate boss, President Joe Biden, to the left. Harris has long talked about wanting to “go inside the system” to “change what needs to be changed.” Yet by depicting herself as a progressive changemaker on issues like policing and immigration, while governing largely as a pragmatist, she often has befuddled the left. ![]() She soon would become a prosecutor and then, of course, a politician, immersing herself in the kinds of institutions and rules that her parents and Harris herself had once protested. By the time Harris spoke out about the cartoon at UC Hastings, she already had completed an internship with the Alameda County District Attorney’s office and was determined to work there. Her political memoirs are replete with stories about family members who felt emboldened to pursue democratic change, signaling that activism was virtually Harris’ birthright.īut that demonstration was likely among her last as an outside agitator. At Howard University, she demonstrated in front of the South African Embassy in Washington to call for an end to apartheid. Harris was introduced to protests as a toddler by her parents, who met as activists on the streets of Berkeley in the 1960s. To hear the now-vice president tell it, this was the kind of role she reprised time and again throughout her life. ![]() ![]() For Black students, she said, according to archives of the Hastings Law News, the cartoon was an example of “what we deal with all the time.” It was February 15, 1989, and the campus had been pulsing with tension for a week, after students discovered that a bulletin board decorated by the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) to commemorate Black History Month had been vandalized with a racist marking: a grotesque caricature of a Black man with a “forbidden” sign slashing his face.Ī third-year law student named Kamala Harris rose to address the crowd of roughly 300 students, faculty and local reporters gathered at “the Beach,” a concrete patio in front of the main classroom building, to make clear that racism wasn’t just one isolated incident. “Rise Above Racism,” “Should This Still Be Happening?” and “What Is Next?” they read. The signs in downtown San Francisco that day, outside of the University of California Hastings College of the Law, might as well have been plucked from today’s racial justice protests. ![]()
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