On The Rise

Indian American senator KAMALA HARRIS came to Washington to do the work and gave women across the US a voice inside the room where it happens.

- Yamiche Alcindor

If you want to ask Senator Ka-mala Harris whether she’s planning to run for president, keep in mind her favourite Cardi B track: “Be careful.” The California Democrat will answer with polite exasperation because to discuss the race with her now, she believes, implies that political ambition motivates her work in the Senate. Instead it’s a deep sense of justice that drives her. “I’m just trying to get at the truth,” says Harris, 54. “I don’t believe my time is to sit here and spew poetry. It’s not for some kind of performance art. It’s not about grand gestures.”

Still, the narrative of her rise is the stuff great political careers are built on. Elected in November 2016, Harris is the lone African American woman in the Senate and its first ever Indian American. She was appointed by Democratic leadership to a seat on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee and has pushed legislation centred around national security, civil rights and bail reform (an issue on which she has found common ground with Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky).

Outside Washington she’s gained fans and critics for her well-documented blunt talk. She’s been on the front lines of every major issue in 2018, and the viral clips add up: Harris grilling Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen about the Trump administration’s controversial child-separation policy; staring down Attorney General Jeff Sessions over his contacts with Russian nationals; pressing then Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh to name laws that govern the bodies of men (as abortion laws govern the bodies of women). After that exchange left Kavanaugh flustered, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah tallied the scorecard: “Goddamn, Kamala Harris brings it.”

THE BEGINNING