Harris changed this election, this election changes America

LZ Granderson, The Tribune News Service

Each night at the Democratic National Convention, the enthusiasm was palpable long before crowds reached the gates. You could feel it in the tone of nearby conversations, the waves of laughter rolling from every direction, the pace of the walk between the ride-share dropoff and the security checkpoint blocks away. In June, Democrats wanted to defeat former President Donald Trump. Now it’s August, and Vice President Kamala Harris has changed what this election is about. She has voters looking toward one another — reminding us of our collective American values and shared humanity.

In 2020, anger and fear drove many of us to the polls. Harris is using a different source of energy, a source embodied in a popular psalm often heard in the civil rights movement: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Democrats showered each other with joy this week. And it wasn’t about their party; it was about our country. Even the heavily armed police officers and Secret Service agents, usually stoic, couldn’t help but flash a smile inside the house that Jordan built. “America, the path that led me here in recent weeks, was no doubt … unexpected,” Harris said in her acceptance speech Thursday. “But I’m no stranger to unlikely journeys.”

Starting with the tea party movement, it felt as if progressives had ceded the idea of “love of country” to the angry mob seething about the election of President Obama and passage of the Affordable Care Act: They were the flag wavers who loudly called themselves patriots. A shift began with the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. Now Harris’ campaign is challenging the right’s claim to patriotism, love of country and — with the sonic drive of Beyoncé’s anthem— the concept of freedom itself. “This whole week has felt like a dream,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign. “I’m like, ‘Am I going to wake up at some point and realize all of this has been a fantasy?’ ”

Robinson grew up not far from where the convention was held. She went to Whitney Young High, the same school as Michelle Obama. The former first lady electrified the crowd Tuesday. Robinson, the first Black woman to lead the largest rights organization in the country, took the stage Wednesday. “There’s been chants of ‘USA’ in the conference halls,” Robinson told me. “Normally I save all of my patriotism for the Olympics, but I finally felt like when people were chanting that, that it wasn’t a threat to me but a story that included me. … That is only possible because of what’s happening right now, because of what Kamala Harris has done.”

In the early days after President Joe Biden announced he was stepping out of the presidential election, there was trepidation over whether America was ready for someone who looked like Harris to be president. Yes, Obama’s hope was aspirational. Yes, Hillary Clinton left 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling. But Harris? As president? For many Americans, this was asking a lot. To envision Harris as the first Black woman to be president, the first person of South Asian descent to be president and the first person in an interracial marriage to be president … that required voters to let go of what has always been and embrace what may be. The answer to the question of whether America’s ready for a president who isn’t white or male has since been answered by the rallying cry of “We’re not going back.”

“It’s very, very powerful,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., told me. “I was elected as the first South Asian to the House on the same night Kamala Harris was the first South Asian to the Senate. When we are elected to these positions, we help Black and brown women and other people see themselves. Something that may not have felt possible suddenly feels possible.” That feeling can change suddenly, but it took decades to change what was possible. Harris accepted the nomination 60 years to the day after Democrats refused to give Mississippi civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer — who was pushing for Black voter representation — a delegation seat at the national convention.

The Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, had just signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. And yet the very next month, his running mate Hubert Humphrey said of Hamer: “The president has said he will not let that illiterate woman speak on the floor of the Democratic convention.” This is what Sam Cooke meant by “A Change Is Gonna Come.” It wasn’t just about the laws on the books. The Civil War brought an end to slavery, but disenfranchising remained. The change needed was one of the heart as well.

Cooke wrote the iconic song not long after he was refused a room in an all-white hotel in Louisiana. He released it in 1964 — a few months before Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the subsequent mistreatment of Hamer; months before Shirley Chisholm, who would become the first Black congresswoman, won her first election; months before Harris was born. If those events seem random and disconnected, Harris’ mother, Shyamala Gopalan, would tell you otherwise. “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” the vice president famously said last year, quoting her mother. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

When you are driven by fear and anger, seeing that connective tissue can become impossible. It’s only through compassion that we can see the ties that bind us. It’s only through compassion that we can find the joy that sustains.

“To hear Kamala speak of her Indian immigrant mother — which reminds me of my own trailblazing mother who moved a half-world away from her family in search of a different life — is incredibly special,” Versha Sharma, editor in chief of Teen Vogue, told me. “We have been told our whole lives growing up as Americans that we can be and do anything, but that’s not been our reality as women of color. Slowly but surely things are starting to change.” That sentiment was echoed by many in and around the week’s convention. “This moment is literally hundreds of years in the making,” said actress Poorna Jagannathan. “Set aside if you are a Democrat, Republican or independent. Who we are as Americans is reflected in this ticket, and it surpasses politics. This story could only happen in America.”