Vice President-Elect, Kamala Harris, is a week shy of making history as the first female to hold office in the White House. The swearing-in ceremony will also be historic as Kamala is of African-American and South-Asian descent, a moment young females of color will surely never forget. As we lead up to this historic Inauguration, Harris will “be sharing the people, places, and moments that have had an influence on my life.”
In a post shared on Instagram today, the Oakland native opened up about the advice her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, gave her, “don’t sit around and complain about things, do something.” The soon-to-be-VP says she has “tried to follow that advice every day and live by the example she set.” Her mothers words would impact the choices the future Vice President made forever.
“Don’t sit around and complain about things, do something.”
Shyamala Gopalan Harris
It is not surprising that Kamala chose to share her single mother as the kick off to her week of sharing up to the Inauguration. The California Senator has been vocal about the important role her mother had in her life, even mentioning her on the night the 2020 election results were announced.
Kamala isn’t the first elected official in the White House to be raised by a single mother, Stanley Ann Dunham raised 44th President of the United States Barrack Obama. On multiple occasions throughout his presidency he mentioned his single mother and how special it was that he was raised by her.
Kamala has been very clear just how influential her Indian mother was in her upbringing. When accepting her nomination for Vice President at the Democratic National Convention she held nothing back. “(My mother) came here from India at age 19 to pursue her dream of curing cancer,” shared Harris, “At the University of California, Berkeley, she met my father, Donald Harris, who had come from Jamaica to study economics. They fell in love in that most American way, while marching for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In the streets of Oakland and Berkley, I got a stroller’s-eye view of people getting into what the great John Lewis called ‘good trouble.'”
“When I was 5, my parents split and my mother raised us mostly on her own. Like so many mothers, she worked around the clock to make it work, packing lunches before we woke up and paying bills after we went to bed, helping us with homework at the kitchen table and shuttling us to church for choir practice. She made it look easy, though it never was.” It was a special shoutout not only to single mothers everywhere, but to children raised by single mothers as well.
We can’t wait to see what the Vice President-Elect shares next and we look forward to the historic moment on January 20, 2021.
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