Top Quotes: “The Truths We Hold” — Kamala Harris
Childhood
“My mother was expected to return to India after she completed her degree. Her parents had an arranged marriage. It was assumed my mother would follow a similar path. But fate had other plans. She and my father met and fell in love at Berkeley while participating in the civil rights movement. Her marriage — and her decision to stay in the US — were the ultimate acts of self-determination and loev.
My parents had two daughters together. My mother received her PhD at age 25, the same year I was born. My beloved sister, Maya, came two years later. Family lore has it that, in both pregnancies, my mother kept working right up to the moment of delivery — one time, her water broke while she was at the lab, and the other while she was making apple strudel.”
“She made [us] feel special, like we could do anything we wanted to if we put in the work.
My mother had been raised in a household where political activism and civic leadership came naturally. Her mother had never attended high school, but she was a skilled community organizer. She would take in women who were being abused by their husbands, and then she’d call the husbands and tell them they’d better shape up or she’d take care of them. She used to gather village women together, educating them about contraception. My grandfather had been part of the movement to win India’s independence. Eventually, as a senior diplomat in the Indian government, he and my grandmother had spent time living in Zambia after it gained independence, helping to settle refugees. He used to joke that my grandmother’s activism would get him in trouble one day. But he knew that was never going to stop her. From them, my mother learned that it was service to others that gave life purpose and meaning. And from my mother, Maya and I learned the same.”
“Social justice was a central part of family discussions. My mother would laugh telling a story she loved about the time I was fussing as a toddler. ‘What do you want?’ she asked, trying to soothe me. ‘Freedom!’ I yelled back.”
“If Maya or I was having a bad day, or if the weather had been gray and depressing for too long, she would throw what she liked to call an ‘unbirthday party,’ with unbirthday cake and unbirthday presents. Other times, she’d make some of our favorite things — chocolate chip pancakes or her ‘Special K’ cereal cookies (‘K’ for Kamala). And often, she would get out the sewing machine and make clothes for us or for our Barbies. She even let Maya and me pick out the color of the family car, a Doge Dart that she drove everywhere. We chose yellow — our favorite color at the time — and if she regretted having empowered us with the decision, she never let on.”
“Kids like me who spent time at Rainbow Sign were exposed to dozens of extraordinary men and women who showed us what we could become. In 1971, Congresswoman Chisholm paid a visit while she was exploring a run for president. Talk about strength! ‘Unbought and unbossed,’ just as her campaign slogan promised. Alice Walker, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple, did a reading at Rainbow Sign. So did Maya Angelou, the first black female bestselling author, thanks to her autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. Nina Simone performed at Rainbow Sign when I was 7.”
“I was happy just where I was. But when I was in middle school, we had to leave. My mother was offered a unique opportunity in Montreal, teaching and conducting research at the Jewish General Hospital. It was an exciting step in advancing her career.
It was not, however, an exciting opportunity for me. I was 12, and the thought of moving away from sunny CA in February, in the middle of the school year, to a French-speaking foreign city covered in 12 feet of snow was distressing, to say the least.”
Criminal Justice
“The Bayview had been home to the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, which helped to build America’s fighting fleet in the mid-20th century. In the 1940s, the prospect of good jobs and affordable housing around the shipyard lured thousands of black Americans who were seeking opportunity and relief from the pain and injustice of segregation. These workers bent the steel and welded the plates that helped our nation win WWII.
But like too many similar neighborhoods in America, the Bayview had been left behind in the postwar era. When the shipyard closed, nothing came to take its place. Beautiful old houses were boarded up; toxic waste polluted the soil, water, and air; drugs and violence poisoned the streets; and poverty of the worst kind settled in for the long haul.”
“A 2015 report found that 95% of our country’s elected prosecutors were white, and 79% were white men.”
“If the best way of providing public safety is preventing crime in the first place, what can we do to prevent people from reoffending?
What if we could really get them back on track?
That question would become the name of the program Tim and I developed together: Back on Track. At the heart of the program was my belief in the power of redemption. Redemption is an age-old concept rooted in many religions. It’s a concept that presupposes that we’ll all make mistakes, and for some, that mistake will rise to the level of being a crime. Yes, there must be consequences and accountability. But after that debt to society has been paid, is it not the sign of a civil society that we allow people to earn their way back?
There was tremendous pushback at first. At the time, criminal justice policy was still trending toward things like harsher sentences or militarizing the police. The guiding belief among many was that the criminal justice system wasn’t punitive enough. More than a decade later, that attitude has, thankfully, evolved, opening up space for a more balanced approach. Reentry programs like Back on Track are now part of the mainstream conversation. But back in those days, I faced intense backlash, including from people I worked with on a regular basis.”
“Tim and I got to work. We wanted to create opportunity by running participants through a rigorous program that I often compared to boot camp. It would include job training, GED courses, community service, parenting and financial literacy classes, as well as drug testing and therapy. The DA’s office led the charge, but we recruited a range of critical partners — from Goodwill Industries, which oversaw community service and employment training, to the SF Chamber of Commerce and its member companies, which helped find jobs for program participants, to local trade unions, which provided valuable apprenticeship opportunities.
Though compassionate in its approach, Back on Track was intense by design. This wasn’t a social welfare program; it was a law enforcement program. All of the first participants were nonviolence first-time offenders. Participants had to first plead guilty and accept responsibility for the actions that had brought them there. We promised that if participants completed the program successfully, we’d have their charges expunged, which gave them even more reason to put in the effort. We hadn’t designed a program that was about incremental improvement around the edges. It was about transformation.”
“A group of 18 men and women walked down the aisle to take their seats. With few exceptions, this was the first time in their lives they’d ever worn graduation robes. Only a handful of them had ever had an occasion to which they could invite their family, an occasion that would make their loved ones cry happy tears. This celebration was hard-won, and they deserved every minute of it.
In the year since they started the program, each of them had, at a minimum, earned a GED and landed a steady job. They’d all done community service — more than 200 hours of it. The fathers among them had paid all of their outstanding child support payments. And they were all drug-free. They proved they could do it — and that it could be done.
In exchange for that effort and that success, we were there to keep our promise. In addition to a diploma, the graduates would have their records cleared by a judge who was standing by.
A number of superior court judges volunteered to preside over Back on Track grads, including my friend John Dearman, a former social worker who became the longest-serving judge in SF history. Another among them was Judge Thelton Henderson, an icon in the civil rights movement who in 1963 lent his car to MLK so Dr. King could make his way to Selma after his own car broke down.
Back on Track quickly proved its merit. After two years, only 10% of Back on Track grads had reoffended, as compared with 50% for others convicted of similar crimes. It represented smart, effective stewardship of taxpayer dollars, too: Our program cost about $5k per participant. For comparison, it costs $10k to prosecute a felony case and another $40k+ to house someone for a year in the county jail.
Local officials don’t have the ability to make national policy. They have no authority beyond their jurisdiction. But when they land on good ideas, even on a small scale, they can create examples that others can replicate. That was a key goal of ours. We wanted to show leaders at every level of government in every state in the union that a reentry initiative could work and was worth trying. So we were especially gratified when the Obama Justice Department adopted Back on Track as a model program.
When I later ran for attorney general, I did so, in no small part, to take the program statewide. And that’s exactly what we did, working in partnership with the LA County Sheriff’s Department to create on Back on Track-LA, in the largest county jail system in the US.”
“The median bail in the US is $10k. But in American households with an income of $45k, the median savings account balance is $2,500. The disparity is so high that at any given time, roughly 9 out of 10 people who are detained can’t afford to pay to get out.”
“The criminal justice system punishes people for their poverty. Where’s the justice in that? And where’s the sense? How does that advance public safety? Between 2000 and 2014, 95% of the growth in the jail population came from people awaiting trial. This is a group of largely nonviolent defendants who haven’t been proven guilty, and we’re spending $38 million a day to imprison them while they await their day in court. Whether or not someone can get bailed out of jail shouldn’t be based on how much money he has in the bank. Or the color of his skin: black men pay 35% higher bail than white men for the same charge. Latino men pay nearly 20% more.”
“We’ve started to see progress: In the decade after we introduced Back on Track, some 33 states have adopted new sentencing and corrections policies aimed at promoting alternatives to incarceration and reducing recidivism. And since 2010, 23 states have reduced their prison populations. But there’s still much more work to do to ensure that punishments are proportionate to the offense.
Women now represent the fastest-growing segment of our incarcerated population. Most of them are mothers, and the vast majority are survivors of violent trauma that usually goes undiagnosed and untreated.”
The Housing Crisis
“The banks gave in. When all was said and done, instead of the $2–4 billion that was originally on the table, we secured an $18 billion deal, which ultimately grew to $20 billion in relief to homeowners. It was a tremendous victory for the people of California.”
“None of the legislators ever explicitly said they were siding with the banks. But in conversation after conversation, they would try to find any technical excuse they could for why they couldn’t support the bill. If only you’d done this. If you’d done that. If only that semicolon wasn’t there.
I’ll never forget one Democratic legislator saying to me, ‘Well, Kamala, I don’t know what’s so bad about these foreclosures. They’re good for our local economy. Because when a house is foreclosed upon and abandoned, that means they have to hire painters and gardeners to clean it up.’ Really? Really? Did this guy also support arson because it keeps fire extinguisher companies in business? It was stunning to me how people would justify being in the pocket of the banks.”
“Countless Americans saw their credit destroyed. Parents’ dreams of financing their children’s education evaporated like mist. Families faced multiple stresses simultaneously — from joblessness to homelessness to abruptly having to switch school districts. One analysis published in The Lancet suggested that ‘the rise in US unemployment during the recession [was] associated with a 4% increase in the suicide rate, corresponding to about 1,330 suicides.’
In many ways, the impact of the crash is still with us in 2018. In Fresno, the overwhelming majority of homes are still valued below their prerecession levels. Nationally, middle-class wealth was nearly wiped out and much of it hasn’t returned.
Studies suggest that the burden hit black families disproportionately. An independent report of the Social Science Research Council, commissioned by the ACLU, found that, whereas white and black families alike were hit hard by the 2007–2009 crisis, by 2011 ‘the typical white family losses slowed to zero, while the typical black family lost an additional 13% of its wealth.’ The consequence: ‘For a typical Black family, median wealth in 2031 will be almost $98k lower than it would have been without the Great Recession.’”
Same-Sex Marriage
“I was quickly sworn in, along with numerous city officials. We stood together performing marriages in the hallway, crowded into every nook and cranny of City Hall. There was all this wonderful excitement building as we welcomed the throngs of loving couples, one by one, to be married then and there. It was unlike anything I’d ever been a part of before. And it was beautiful.
But not long after, the marriages were invalidated. The couples who’d been so happy and hopeful received letters telling them that their marriage licenses wouldn’t be recognized under the law. It was, for each and every one of them, a devastating setback.
In May 2008, the California Supreme Court came to the rescue. The court held that the same-sex marriage ban was unconstitutional, which paved the way for LGBTQ couples to realize the equal dignity they’d always deserved. And over the next six months, 18,000 same-sex couples exchanged wedding vows in California.
But in November 2008, on the same night that Obama was elected president, the people of CA narrowly voted to pass Prop 8, stripping same-sex couples of their right to marry. Because this was a constitutional amendment, it couldn’t be overturned by the legislature or the state court system. No new marriages could be performed. Couples who’d already been married were placed in a cruel limbo.
There was one clear route left to justice: the federal courts. The American Foundation for Equal Rights, decided that the best way to respond was to bring suit against the state, arguing that Prop 8 violated the protections granted to every citizen in the 14th Amendment: equal protection and due process. This was a matter of civil rights and civil justices, and the team planned to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court. The org hired the lawyers who’d argued against each other in Bush v. Gore, then failed a lawsuit on behalf of two same-sex couples whose job was to represent in court the millions of people just like them, people who simply wanted to be accorded the human dignity of marrying the person they loved.
It would take 8 months for the lawsuit to make its way to the first stage of the fight: the US federal district court. Inside that courtroom, a judge would hear from witnesses, review evidence, and, based on the facts before him, decide whether Prop 8 had violated civil rights. On August 4, 2010, the chief judge ruled in their favor, concluding that Prop 8 was indeed unconstitutional and affirming the right of same-sex couples to marry. It was fantastic and important news. But, as is common practice, the judge decided he was going to wait to enforce the ruling until it was appealed to a higher court — a legal concept known as a stay.
I was in the middle of my race for attorney general when the ruling came down, and it quickly became a central issue in the campaign. The CA attorney general had the right to appeal the decision. Jerry Brown, who I was running to succeed, had refused to defend the measure in court. I, too, made clear that I had no intention of spending a penny of the attorney general’s office’s resources defending Prop 8. My opponent took the other view. I understood that it wasn’t just about principle; it was about practical outcomes. If CA refused to appeal the ruling, the lower court judge could lift the stay and the state could start issuing marriage licenses again right away. If CA did appeal, on the other hand, it would take years before marriages could begin.
When I won the election, my refusal to appeal the decision should’ve been the end of it. But Prop 8 proponents were unwilling to give up the fight. In an unusual move, they joined together to appeal the ruling themselves. In my view, they had no basis for doing so. Your right o free speech doesn’t give you the right to interfere in a court proceeding. You don’t get to be a party in a lawsuit simply because you have strong feelings about something.”
“And yet the appeal proceeded. The ruling stayed on hold. It would take more than a year before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issued its decision. Each day of delay represented justice denied.
There was much to applaud in the 9th Circuit’s ruling. A three-judge panel affirmed the lower court’s decision that Prop 8 had deprived same-sex couples of their civil rights in CA. But the court didn’t take issue with the Prop 8 proponents’ right to appeal. Instead, the court issued a stay in its ruling and allowed them to appeal once again — this time to the Supreme Court.”
“On the morning of June 26, 2013, we received wonderful news. The Supreme Court agreed that Prop 8 proponents had no standing to appeal, and dismissed the case in a 5–4 decision. This meant the lower court ruling would stand. And that meant marriage equality was the law again in CA — finally.”
Education
“I was concerned about early interventions, about the kinds of steps we could take as a community — and a country — to keep children safe and on track to begin with. I wanted to identify key moments in a child’s life when my office could make a difference.
It was during that process that I started connecting a series of research-related dots. The first concerned the importance of third-grade reading proficiency. Studies show that the end of third grade is a critical milestone. Up until that point, the curriculum focuses on teaching students to learn to read. In fourth grade, there’s a shift and students transition to reading in order to learn. If students can’t read, they can’t learn, and they fall further behind, month after month, year after year — which forces them onto a nearly inescapable path to poverty. The door of opportunity closes on them when they’re barely four feet fall. I believe it’s tantamount to a crime when a child goes without an education.”
Love
“My best friend was blowing up my phone. I stepped out and called her.
‘What’s going on? Is everything okay?
‘Yes, everything is great. You’re going on a date,’ she said.
‘I am?’
‘You are,’ she replied with total certainty. I just met this guy. He’s cute and he’s the managing partner of his law firm and I think you’re going to really like him. He’s based in LA, but you’re always here for work anyway.
Chrisette is like a sister to me, and I knew there was no use in arguing with her.
‘What’s his name?’ I asked.
‘His name is Doug, but promise me you won’t Google him. Don’t overthink it. Just meet him. I already gave him your number. He’s going to reach out.’
Part of me groaned, but at the same time, I appreciated Chrisette’s take-charge approach.”
Immigration
“In 2016, researchers at the National Foundation for American Policy found that more than half of Silicon Valley’s billion-dollar startups were founded by one or more immigrants.”
“Instead of making us more safe, the increased raids and executive orders instill fear. ‘For this reason,’ I said, ‘studies have shown Latinos are more than 40% less likely to call 911 when they’ve been a victim of crime. This climate of fear drives people underground.’
“Even after the wars [in Central America] ended, the violence didn’t. A broken economy with deep poverty and few jobs, awash in weapons and generational destruction, led to the formation of organized criminal orgs that used murder, rape, and other sexual violence to control territory and take over large swaths of the region. In the years since, more people have been killed and kidnapped in the Northern Triangle than in some of the world’s most brutal wars. Between 2011 and 2014, nearly 50,000 people were murdered in the Northern Triangle, and just 5% of the deaths resulted in judicial convictions.
For residents of these countries, life is often defined by terror. Gang violence, drug trafficking, and corruption are rampant. The largest and most notorious of these transnational criminal orgs, MS-13 and the Mara 18, are reported to include as many as 85,000 members worldwide. They extort small business owners and residents in poor neighborhoods into paying hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Those who don’t pay risk death, for them and their families. The gangs recruit young men to join their ranks through threats and intimidation, and they force teen girls to endure sexual violence as so-called gang girlfriends.”
Healthcare
“A 2016 study found a ten-year gap in life expectancy in America between the most affluent women and the poorest. That means that being poor reduces your life expectancy more than a lifetime of smoking cigarettes.”
“58% of Americans take prescription drugs; 1 in 4 takes four or more; and among those currently taking drugs, 1 in 4 find their medications difficult to afford.”
“Why are Americans paying so much more for the medicines we need? Because, unlike many other advanced countries, the US government doesn’t negotiate prices on prescription drugs. When a government is purchasing medicines in bulk, it can negotiate a better price and pass those cost savings to consumers — much like the savings you get at Costco. But the current US healthcare system doesn’t allow for such deal making.
Medicare, which covers about 55 million people, could have incredible bargaining power to drive significantly lower prescription prices through negotiation. But lawmakers from both parties, at the behest of the pharmaceutical lobby, have prohibited Medicare from doing so. Individual health insurance plans are allowed to negotiate, but with their relatively small numbers of enrollees, they have little leverage to make a dent in prices.”
“In segregated cities like Baltimore, there are 20-year gaps in the life expectancy of those living in poor black neighborhoods and those living in wealthier and whiter areas. ‘A baby born in Cheswolde, in Baltimore’s far NW corner, can expect to live until 87,’ writes Olga Khazon in The Atlantic. ‘9 miles away in Clifton-Berea, the life expectancy is 67, roughly the same as that of Rwanda, and 12 years shorter than the American average.’
These disparities begin in the delivery room. Black babies are twice as likely as white babies to die in infancy, a stunning disparity that’s wider than in 1850, when slavery was still legal. In fact, infant mortality rates for black babies today are higher than they were for white infants at the time of the Heckler Report. In other words, today, black infants are less likely to survive their first year than white babies were in the early 1980s.
Black women are also at least 3x as likely to die due to complications relating to pregnancy than white women — a shocking gulf that transcends socioeconomic status. A major 5-year study in NYC found that college-educated black women are more likely to face severe complications in pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never made it through high school.”
“One study found that children who go through at least six adverse childhood experiences could see their life expectancy reduced by more than 20 years. Physiological stress leads to hypertension, which results in higher rates of infant and maternal mortality, among other conditions. Research has even found that certain levels of stress shorten our telomeres, which are structures that hold our chromosomes together. A we age, our telomeres naturally get shorter until cells start dying, which leads to disease. A study at the U of Michigan measured the telomere length in hundreds of women and found that black women were biologically more than seven years older than white women their age.”
“We need med schools to focus proactively on bringing more diversity into the field. As of 2013, only about 9% of our country’s physicians are nonwhite, and only 4% are black.”
“Across the country, nearly 500k patients are on dialysis, going 3x a week to have their blood circulated out of their body through a multi-hour process that mimics a healthy kidney’s function.
Who are these patients? Disproportionately, they come from low-income communities. People living in certain zip codes are far more likely to end up with kidney failure, which is most commonly the result of diabetes and high blood pressure. Black Americans develop kidney failure at 3.5 times the rate of white Americans, and they constitute nearly 1/3 of all US dialysis patients.”
“DaVita was sued in 2017 for keeping its clinics so understaffed and requiring such high-speed care and turnover that patients’ lives were endangered.”
“The CDC estimates that there were 72,000 drug overdose deaths in America in 2017 alone. That’s nearly twice what it was ten years earlier.”
Social Justice
“[My mother] showed us, in so many ways, how much she valued all work, not just her own. When something good would happen at the lab, my mother would come home with flowers for our babysitter.
‘I wouldn’t have been able to do what I did if you didn’t do what you do,’ she would say, ‘Thank you for everything.’
She saw the dignity in the work that society requires to function. She believed that everyone deserves respect for the work they do, and that hard effort should be rewarded and honored.”
“Bill Gates is obsessed with fertilizer. ‘I go to meetings where it’s a serious topic of conversation,’ he writes. ‘I read books about its benefits and the problems with overusing it. It’s the kind of topic I have to remind myself not to talk about too much at cocktail parties, since most people don’t find it as interesting as I do.’ Why the fascination? He explains that 40% of people on earth owe their lives to higher crop outputs that were made possible only because of fertilizer. It was the literal fuel for the Green Revolution, which helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. What Gates understands is that there’s a big difference between announcing a plan to end world hunger and actually ending it. And closing the gap depends on seemingly mundane details like fertilizer and weather patterns and the height of wheat.”
“You have to sweat the small stuff — because sometimes it turns out that the small stuff is actually the big stuff. I read a story once about a principal at a St. Louis elementary school who wanted to take on rampant truancy in her school. When she talked to parents, she realized that many of the kids didn’t have clean clothes. Either they didn’t have access to washing machines or their families couldn’t afford detergent or their power had been shut off. Students were embarrassed to show up at school in dirty clothes.
So the principal had a washer and dryer installed at her school, and she invited students who’d missed 10+ days of class to do their laundry on campus. According to City-Lab, in the first year of the initiative, more than 90% of the students they tracked boosted their attendance.”
“In spring 1966, Cesar Chavez led a 340-mile march of Latinx and Filipino farmworkers from California’s Central Valley to its state capital in an effort to spur action and direct the country’s eyes at the unconscionable ways that farmworkers were being treated. That summer, the United Farm Workers was formed, and under Chavez’s leadership, it would become one of the most important civil rights and labor rights orgs in the country.
At the same time, 2,000 miles away, MLK was leading the Chicago Freedom Movement. Through speeches and rallies and marches and meetings, he demanded everything from the end of housing discrimination to the need for high-quality education for all.
In September 1966, King sent Chavez a telegram. He wrote about the many fronts on which the battle for equality must be fought — ‘in the urban slums, in the sweat shops of the factories and fields. Our separate struggles are really one — a struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity.’”
“On the day that Dr. Ford testified, the National Sexual Assault Hotline saw a 200% increase in calls. Women were calling into to C-SPAN to share their stories. Writing op-eds. Telling their husbands and fathers. They were speaking their truth — and in doing so, making plainer than ever the pervasiveness of sexual violence.”
“Anita Hill’s testimony wasn’t enough to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court in 1991, but it brought the term ‘sexual harassment’ into the mainstream and started a national conversation. Less than two months after Hill’s testimony, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which expanded the remedies available to victims of sexual harassment. The following year, Democratic women took the 1992 elections by storm, doubling the number of women in the House and tripling the number of women in the Senate.”
