Biden's running mate symbol of evolving US

When US presidential candidate Joe Biden picked California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, he opened many possibilities, as well as a few subdued resentments.

Harris is symbolic of evolving America that is torn between a past of sordid discrimination and atrocities on people who are not white and a possible bright future of the original American vision/dream of opportunities for the taking.

She is neither white nor the first woman to run for that high office. Three other women preceded her; Angela Davis, Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin. Harris, however has a chance of clinching the position, thereby symbolising serious change in American political outlook.

Davis was unique in the 1960s and 1970s as a civil rights activist struggling with her triple identities as a woman, black, and communist. She was a vice-presidential candidate for the Communist Party of the United States (CPUS) but CPUS never had a chance of winning.

Her lasting fame was in her deeply analytical book, 'Women, Race, and Class' in which she examined the three-way identity conflict within a person who is woman, black, and a communist. Being all three, she raised questions of the circumstances that dictate which identity to stress, and when.

The other two women vice-presidential candidates, despite being elected officials, had less distinguished political backgrounds. Ferraro was a Congresswoman from California before Walter Mondale picked her in 1984 to run against Ronald Reagan.

Palin was governor of Alaska before John McCain chose her in the 2008 campaign against Barack Obama. Both women had little impact on the election outcome, in part, because they were riding against the political tide. For Harris, the political tide is different and Biden, her principal candidate, is not weak.

Riding on the tide, Harris has a real chance of becoming vice-president and in being that symbol of evolving America. The United States, the strongest and richest of the world wide British colonial implants, attracts migrants from other former extensions of the expansive British Empire. These include Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Harris' mother is an Indian from the Indian and her father a Jamaican.

Harris advances beyond where other successful second generation third world migrants like Nikki Haley and Barack Obama left. Although they all worked their way into the inside of the United States to become key policy players, there occasionally lingers questions of their 'Americanness', which forces them to work extra hard.

Haley, with full blooded migrant Indian parents, managed to get elected governor of South Carolina and then Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations. Obama’s parents, a Kenyan father and an American mother from Kansas, met at the University of Hawaii. Trump has spent time and energy questioning Obama’s Americanness.

In the emerging American political accommodation of mainly ambitious people with external roots, egos get bruised. Before Obama plunged into the US presidential race, for instance, Reverend Jesse Jackson had been the perennial black candidate, forcing African and African-American issues into campaign platforms.

He was, as US Ambassador to Kenya Prudence Bushnell once termed him, a ‘terrific American’ but his political star never rose above being an articulate maverick. To Jackson’s chagrin, Obama showed up, upstaged and injured Jesse’s ego, and took away the prize.

White world

Unaware that the ‘mike’ was on, Jesse expressed desire to squeeze Obama somewhere. And Cornell West, a black intellectual, later grumbled about ‘Brother Barack’ being lost in the white world.

Similarly, Harris is likely to receive a lot of official ‘sisterly’ support in the midst of subdued grumblings that Biden’s choice should probably have gone to a traditional woman, black or white, with deep multi-generational roots in the American past.

The grumblings, however, are not likely to take the spark from the Harris excitement and the fact that she is Biden compatible. In the current US coronavirus crisis and an administration that has seemingly lost touch with reality, Harris might be symbolic of new hope that not all in Washington is lost.

Prof Munene teaches at the USIU in Nairobi.