We Jamaicans are not easily intimidated. Ask Kamala Harris. Or, better yet, ask John McCain. Ask Richard Burr. They were among the Republican senators who tried – and failed – to shut her up during recent committee hearings.
She kept talking back. Yes, a woman, a black woman, had the temerity to stand up to her white, male bullies. As Bob Dylan sang so long ago, the times they are a-changin’.
Ms. Harris is the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. Her father is Jamaican-born Donald Harris, a professor at Stanford University, and her mother is Dr Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast cancer specialist, from Chennai, India.
And she’s a groundbreaker. She broke the color barrier in California when she won her US Senate seat. Never before had California sent a black or Latino candidate to the Senate.
And that was par for the course for her. Ms. Harris was the first woman elected as San Francisco’s district attorney and the first woman elected as California’s attorney general.
So it doesn’t surprise me when she joins Bernie Sanders in proposing legislation to extend Medicare coverage to all Americans. Of all the so-called Democrats in the Senate, hers is the lone voice raised so far in support of Bernie’s single-payer health care bill.
I guess it takes a Jamaican to boldly go where others dare not go. And that’s what we need from the Democrats. They’ve compromised for too long. It’s time for the party to stand for something.
Ms. Harris explains she backed Bernie’s bill because “it was the right thing to do.”
Isn’t that reason enough?
More and more, it looks as if Ms. Harris would be the Democrats’ best bet in the 2020 presidential race.
A Jamaican in the White House. Wouldn’t that be something?
Ms. Harris at Committee hearings.
