Vice President Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech was a call for a new path forward, to a country where a woman’s job is commander-in-chief. It was also a callback to the past, to her immigrant mother who joined America’s fight for freedom and taught her daughter to never let anyone define her, but to define herself on her own terms.
Over a 40-minute address that unfolded in stories about her career as a tough prosecutor, inspired both by a close friend’s plight and civil rights legends and in stories about her time in the White House, Harris spoke not in soaring oratory, but in a conversational way. If a perennial question for women is how to run for office without seeming too shrill or too ambitious or too something, then Harris has figured this out, simply by being herself, laugh and all. She looked and sounded like an American president, forceful in her defense of democracy and proud of the nation’s ability to inspire the world and renew its promise.
“We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world,” she said. “And on behalf of our children and our grandchildren and all those who sacrificed so dearly for our freedom and liberty, we must be worthy of this moment.”
She appeared on stage, wearing a blue pants suit and flag pin, to a roaring crowd that strained capacity at Chicago’s United Center. Many were members of her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, dressed in white and draped in pearls in homage to her. There was a quiet and workmanlike quality to her speech. For those insistent that detailed policy plans matter above all else, Harris pledged to build the middle class, secure the border and fight for women’s reproductive freedom, which she smartly connected to the economy.
“I believe America cannot truly be prosperous unless Americans are fully able to make their own decisions about their own lives, especially on matters of heart and home,” she said.
Harris’ speech capped a week featuring the Democratic Party’s brightest stars, showcasing a broad, diverse and inclusive party, some unafraid to name America’s greatest sins. From Michelle Obama, America heard about former President Donald Trump’s dangerous attacks on her family and the kind of affirmative action that is only the province of White folks.
“His limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black,” the former first lady said. “Wait, I want to know: Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’”?
But, the American presidency has never been one of those women’s jobs, and that is Harris’ hurdle, breaking that “highest, hardest, glass ceiling” as Hillary Clinton first called it in 2008 and again in 2016.
Harris, 59, runs as a record 12 women serve as governors. A Black woman has never been elected governor, though Stacey Abrams came close in Georgia. Two Black women, Angela Alsobrooks in Maryland, and Lisa Blunt Rochester in Delaware are seeking US Senate seats. They are the favorites to make history, just as Harris did before them and can do again. Just off stage as Harris spoke were a group of women who call themselves “the colored girls”— convention co-chairs Minyon Moore and Bishop Leah Daughtry — and who worked as hidden figures on campaigns dating back to Jesse Jackson and were inspired by women like Representative Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn, who was the first Democratic woman to run for the White House in 1972.
Harris, who was on the front lines of the civil rights struggle as a toddler marching along with her parents, paid tribute to Chisholm in her failed 2020 presidential run by adopting a similar color scheme and typeface in her logo.
She was, at times, withering in her criticism of Trump. She painted him as a man apart, unserious and untethered from the country’s values and virtues, the very mores she embodies. Trump is the choice of dictators, she said.
“They know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors. They know Trump won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself,” she said. “And as president, I will never waver in defense of America’s security and ideals because in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand, and I know where the United States belongs.”
In the last four weeks, Harris has deftly navigated one of the most extraordinary periods in political history — a reluctant sitting president passed her the torch, and she ran with it, sewing up her party’s nomination, filling campaign coffers and volunteer rolls and sparking untold memes. While she has pulled even in the race with Trump, 78, and opened several paths to the Oval Office, she rightly insists that she is an underdog.
And it’s because Harris, a graduate of Howard University, knows this country’s history and how powerful the forces of both racism and sexism have been. She also deeply believes in this country’s ability to overcome.
It was exactly 60 years ago that famed Mississippi civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the credentialing committee of the Democratic convention after they refused to seat her racially integrated Freedom Democratic Party instead of an all-White delegation. Hamer spoke of being fired, shot at, jailed and severely beaten after trying to vote. Hers was a primetime address too, a searing indictment of the America that Harris was born into just two months later.
“Is this America,” Hamer asked.
Six decades on, this is the fundamental question at the heart of this election.
Is America a nation nostalgic for a divisive past or, in Hamer’s words, ready to go up this freedom road together?
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Nia-Malika Henderson is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former senior political reporter for CNN and the Washington Post, she has covered politics and campaigns for almost two decades.
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