Who is Kamala Harris, First Female, Colored Vice President?

Kamala Harris, just became America's first female, first Black and first South Asian vice president-elect. 

The new Vice President has achieved with President -Elect Joe Biden a landslide victory over Donald Trump, scoring success for millions of women, often overlooked, historically underrepresented and systematically ignored, but now became the recipients of that new power for the first time in the country's 200-plus-year history.

According to CNN, Harris' triumph, in particular, marks a new high point in a career of barrier-breaking accomplishments, from San Francisco district attorney to California attorney general to just the second-ever Black female US senator.

"That I am here tonight is a testament to the dedication of generations before me," Harris said during her Democratic National Convention acceptance speech in August, mentioning women such as Constance Baker Motley, Fannie Lou Hamer and Shirley Chisholm.

"Women and men who believed so fiercely in the promise of equality, liberty and justice for all," she said.

Harris attended Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington. Her time at Howard, where she joined Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., profoundly shaped her political vision.

"You didn't have to be confined by anyone else's idea of what it means to be Black," she told CNN's Dana Bash on "State of the Union" in September. "You could be a fine arts student and also be class president. You could be homecoming queen and be the head of the science club. You could be a member of a sorority and be in student government and want to go to law school, and it encouraged you to be your full self."

Over the course of her White House bid, Harris never shied away from mentioning that people attempted to box her in or doubted her as she sought to pave a path in politics.

"I didn't listen. And the people didn't listen, either. And we won," she would say.

Born in Oakland, California, to a father from Jamaica, and a mother from India, Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. She began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney's Office, before being recruited to the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and later the City Attorney of San Francisco's office. In 2003, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco. She was elected Attorney General of California in 2010 and re-elected in 2014.

She defeated Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 Senate election to become the second African American woman and the first South Asian American to serve in the United States Senate. As a senator, she has advocated for healthcare reform, federal descheduling of cannabis, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, the DREAM Act, a ban on assault weapons, and progressive tax reform. She gained a national profile for her pointed questioning of Trump administration officials during Senate hearings, including Trump's second Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault.

Harris ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination and attracted national attention before ending her campaign on December 3, 2019. She was announced as former vice president Joe Biden's running mate in the 2020 election on August 11, 2020.

During the campaign, she angered her father when she mentioned that she smoked weed while she was a student and tied her previous marijuana use to her Jamaican roots.

Speaking to to the Kingston-based website Jamaica Global Online, her father, Donald Harris, released a statement denouncing his daughter's remarks. “My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation, and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics.”

“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty," he added.