The San Francisco Chronicle is not holding back on its praise of Kamala Harris inauguration as vice president, including portraying her rise to power as “counterpoint to insurrection.”
The news outlet in Harris’ home state praised Harris as the antidote to a divided nation following a turbulent presidential election:
As images of white supremacists storming the Capitol sear into Americans’ minds, there is about to be another image that provides the case for optimism about the future: the moment when Kamala Harris, first Black woman and woman of color to be inaugurated as vice president, is sworn in.
Veterans of the civil rights movement and scholars of Black American history say there is no mistaking that the nation is in a moment of distress, as it grapples with a deadly insurrection that threatened the lives of the vice president and dozens of lawmakers as well as the constitutional process for the peaceful transfer of power.
But while it’s easy to see the actions of the mob as a dark cloud over the historic day, they say, the focus should be on the bright light shining through.
One Democrat compared the Harris inauguration to a religious experience.
“As a woman of faith, the Scriptures always remind us that the light outshines the darkness, and I truly believe that,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), said. “And this is the moment where we really have to believe and focus on that in spite of the darkness. The light is the first woman of color, the first Black woman, the first Asian American woman to be inaugurated as our vice president. What a remarkable moment this is in our history.”
U.S. Vice President-elect Kamala Harris (R) and her husband Douglas Emhoff (L) arrive for a ceremony to honor the nearly 400,000 American victims of the coronavirus pandemic at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on January 19, 2021 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
In an interview with the Chronicle, Harris agreed with Lee the focus should be on the “bright spots, not the dark.”
“It’s like when you see a rainbow,” Harris said. “No one ever looks at a rainbow and then just keeps going. If you have anyone around you, you say, ‘Look at the rainbow,’ right? Well, look at Jan. 5. Look at what happened when a Black Baptist preacher and a Jewish man were elected by the state of Georgia to go to the United States Senate.”
“Or even bringing it back to me,” Harris said. “Look at the fact that in the midst of all that we have seen and experienced over these last few years, that America … elected on their top ticket a woman for the first time … who also happens to be a woman of color.”
The Chronicle found a scholar who claims Harris’ “ascent to power” in the midst of “the threat of an uprising consisting in part of white supremacists” and that the Biden-Harris win and the victory of two Democrats to the Senate “show that the rioters who stormed the Capitol with ties to white supremacy are poised to be the losers in the story, not the victors.”
“It’s not preordained which way we’ll go,” John A. Powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, said. “What we do matters. We have choices to make, and we can in fact — when things are at an inflection point, things are more fluid. Once they ossify, they’re harder to change. … We’re in a deep space of unknowing.”
“This is probably the second most important electoral moment in Black political history — the ability of black Georgians to affect the political process to turn the party domination and rule in the state to their preferred party,” James Lance Taylor, a professor and director of the African American Studies program at the University of San Francisco, said. “Kamala is a tipping point. Georgia is a tipping point.”
“Harris, for her part, says the pro-Trump insurrection is a sign of the work that still remains ahead in the fight for justice,” the Chronicle reported.
“I don’t know that I’ve fully processed the duality, to be honest,” Harris said. “The things that keep me up at night are vaccinations for the 320 million people in the country. … But there’s no question that what we saw Jan. 6 was horrific. There are these moments that occur that force us to … look in a mirror and ask who are we?”
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