Who next will follow in Obama, Harris's footsteps?

Kamala Harris’ immigrant background — with its uncanny parallels to Barack Obama’s — makes me wonder if a woman like me, descended from Black people, enslaved in America, can ever be viable on a presidential ticket

- Erin B. Logan

When I told my high school religion teacher I wanted to be president, he encouraged me to pick a more realistic profession for a Black woman.

His comment stunned me. Barack Obama was then in the fourth year of his presidency, but my teacher, who is white, thought that a Black politician had made it to the White House only because of the severe economic downturn and a slowly changing electorate. Most white Americans did not vote for Obama in either the 2008 or 2012 election, and the backlash against him began immediately after he took office.

Perhaps I could beat the odds, my teacher said. But history suggested that my imagined campaign was dead on arrival.

I had dreamed of becoming president since the second grade. This country is full of incompetent leaders who make terrible decisions. I believed I could do better. But my religion teacher’s analysis triggered angst, which worsened after Donald Trump’s uncouth appeals to white racial resentment made dog-whistling seem genteel.

Sure, in Georgia, Stacey Abrams nearly won her 2018 race for governor and she helped organize the impressive turnout that helped deliver the state to Joe Biden this year. And that warmed my soul. A politician whose nightly tradition includes wrapping her hair in a bonnet nearly became the chief executive of my home state. But it would be hard to imagine a woman like Abrams prevailing in a nationwide contest.

You’re probably thinking: What about Vice President-elect Kamala Harris?

Her spectacular ascent is inspiring. She is more than qualified to be next in line to the presidency. Her status as a graduate of a historically Black university, and her Caribbean and South Asian heritage, are unorthodox.