The Truths We Hold

by Kamala Harris

  I think it was that realization that turned my sights to elected office. Of all the problems I saw in front of me, few were in more urgent need of fixing than the district attorney’s office. While we were making important gains at the city attorney’s office, the district attorney’s office was self-destructing. Talented career prosecutors were seeing their efforts undervalued and feeling stymied in the vital work to which they’d devoted their lives. Meanwhile, violent felons were walking free. I knew this. We all knew this. But suddenly it wasn’t just an important problem to be solved. It was an important problem I could solve.

  I wanted to honor, support, and empower the DA’s office as a whole. But in order to run the office, I would have to run for office. A political campaign would be a huge undertaking, and one I clearly couldn’t embark upon lightly. I turned to my friends, my family, my colleagues, my mentors. We had long, animated debates (another thesis to defend). We weighed the pros and cons, and then we weighed them all again.

  People were generally supportive of the idea, but they were worried, too. My would-be opponent and former boss was already a household name. He also had a reputation as a fighter; in fact, his nickname was Kayo (as in K.O.)—a tribute to the many knockouts he scored in his boxing youth. A campaign would be not only bruising but also expensive, and I had no experience as a fund-raiser.

  Was this really the time for me to run? I had no way of knowing. But more and more, I was coming to feel that “wait and see” wasn’t an option. I thought of James Baldwin, whose words had defined so much of the civil rights struggle. “There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation,” he’d written. “The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.”

  Two

  A VOICE FOR JUSTICE

  Kamala, let’s go. Come on, we’re going to be late.” My mother was losing patience. “Just a second, Mommy,” I called back. (Yes, my mother was and always will be “Mommy” to me.) We were on our way to campaign headquarters, where volunteers were gathering. My mother often took charge of the volunteer operation, and she didn’t dillydally. Everyone knew that when Shyamala spoke, you listened.

  We drove from my apartment, near Market Street, past the wealth and attractions of San Francisco’s downtown to a predominantly black neighborhood in the southeast part of town known as Bayview–Hunters Point. The Bayview had been home to the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, which helped to build America’s fighting fleet in the mid-twentieth 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 the Second World War.

  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. It was a community disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system and also plagued by unsolved crimes. Families in the Bayview, many of which had generational roots in San Francisco, were cut off—literally and figuratively—from the promise of the thriving city they called home. The Bayview was the kind of place that no one in the city ever saw unless they made it their business to go there. You didn’t pass it on the freeway. You didn’t cross it to get from one part of the city to another. It was, in deeply tragic ways, invisible to the world beyond it. I wanted to be a part of changing that. So I headquartered my campaign at 3rd Avenue and Galvez, right in the heart of the Bayview.

  The political consultants thought I was nuts. They said no campaign volunteers would ever come to the Bayview from other parts of the city. But it was places like the Bayview that had inspired me to run in the first place. I wasn’t running so I could have a fancy office downtown. I was running for the chance to represent people whose voices weren’t being heard, and to bring the promise of public safety to every neighborhood, not just some. Besides, I didn’t believe that people wouldn’t come to the Bayview. And I was right: They did come. By the dozens.

  San Francisco, like our country as a whole, is diverse yet deeply segregated—more mosaic than melting pot. Yet our campaign attracted people representing the full vibrancy of the whole community. Volunteers and supporters poured in from Chinatown, the Castro, Pacific Heights, the Mission District: white, black, Asian, and Latinx; wealthy and working-class; male and female; old and young; gay and straight. A group of teenage graffiti artists decorated the back wall of campaign headquarters, spray-painting JUSTICE in giant letters. HQ buzzed with volunteers, some calling voters, some sitting together around a table stuffing envelopes, others picking up clipboards so they could go door-to-door talking to people in the community about what we were trying to do.

  We pulled up to headquarters just in time. I let my mother out.

  “You have the ironing board?” she asked.

  “Yeah, of course, it’s in the back seat.”

  “Okay. I love you,” she said as she shut the car door.

  As I drove away, I could hear her call, “Kamala, what about the duct tape?”

  I had the duct tape.

  I got back on the road and drove toward the nearest supermarket. It was a Saturday morning, the equivalent of rush hour in the grocery aisles. I pulled into the parking lot, snuck my car into one of the few open spots, and grabbed the ironing board, the tape, and a campaign sign that looked slightly worn from being tossed in and out of the car.

  If you think running for office sounds glamorous, I wish you could have seen me striding through the parking lot with an ironing board under my arm. I remember the kids who would look curiously at the ironing board and point, and the moms who would hustle them past. I couldn’t blame them. I must have looked out of place—if not totally out of my mind.

  But an ironing board makes for the perfect standing desk. I set it up in front of the supermarket entrance, just off to the side, near the carts, and taped up a sign that read KAMALA HARRIS, A VOICE FOR JUSTICE. When the campaign was just getting started, my friend Andrea Dew Steele and I had put together my first piece of campaign literature: a basic, one-page, black-and-white bio and summary of my positions. Andrea would later found Emerge America, an organization that recruits and trains Democratic women to run for elected office nationwide. I put several stacks of my flyer on the ironing board and, next to it, a clipboard with a sign-up sheet. Then I got to work.

  Shoppers rolled their carts out the automatic doors, squinting at the sunlight, trying to remember where they parked the car. And then, out of left field:

  “Hi! I’m Kamala Harris. I’m running for district attorney, and I hope to have your support.”

  In truth, I would have settled for them just remembering my name. Early on in the campaign, we did a poll to see how many people in the county of San Francisco had heard of me. The answer was a whopping 6 percent. As in six of every one hundred people had heard of me before. I couldn’t help but wonder: Was my mother one of the people they’d randomly called?

  But I hadn’t gotten into this thinking it would be easy. I knew I’d have to work hard to introduce myself and what I stood for to a whole lot of people who had no idea who I was.

  For some first-time candidates, interacting with strangers can feel awkward, and understandably so. It isn’t easy to initiate a conversation with someone who passes you on the street, or to try to connect with them at the bus stop on their way home after work, or to walk into a merchant’s business and try to strike up a conversation with the owner. I got my share of polite—and occasionally not so polite—rebuffs, like a telemarketer calling during dinner. But more often than not, I encountered people who were welcoming, open, and eager to talk about the issues affecting their daily lives and their h
opes for their family and their community—whether that meant cracking down on domestic violence or creating better options for at-risk kids. Years later, I still run into people who remember our interactions at those bus stops.

  It may sound strange, but the thing it reminded me of most was jury selection. When I worked as a prosecutor, I spent a lot of time in the courtroom, talking to people who’d been called for jury duty from every part of the community. My job was to ask them questions over the course of a few minutes and, based on that, try to figure out their priorities and perspectives. Campaigning was kind of like that, but without opposing counsel trying to cut me off. I loved being able to engage. Sometimes a mom would come out of the grocery store with a toddler in the shopping cart seat, and we’d find ourselves spending a good twenty minutes talking about her life, and her struggles, and her daughter’s Halloween costume. Before we parted, I’d look her in the eye and say, “I hope I can have your support.” It’s amazing how often people would tell me that no one had ever asked them that directly before.

  Still, this process didn’t come naturally to me. I was always more than happy to talk about the work to be done. But voters wanted to hear about more than just policy. They wanted to know about me personally—who I was, what my life had been like, the experiences that had shaped me. They wanted to understand who I was on a fundamental level. But I’d been raised not to talk about myself. I’d been raised with the belief that there was something narcissistic about doing so. Something vain. And so, even though I understood what was motivating their questions, it took some time before I got used to it.

  There were multiple candidates in my first DA’s race, and a runoff was inevitable. But our polling (which had markedly improved over time) suggested that if we just made the runoff, we could win five weeks later.

  I spent Election Day on the streets shaking hands, from the pre-dawn commute until the polls closed. Chrisette, one of my closest friends, flew in to help with the last-minute campaigning. It felt like the final quarter-mile sprint at the end of a marathon—thrilling in its own way. My family, friends, senior campaign staff members, and I went out to dinner as the results started rolling in. My campaign manager, Jim Stearns, was at the elections office watching the count and calling in the numbers. Over the course of the meal, my dear friend Mark Leno, who was then a member of the California State Assembly, kept track of the counts along with Maya, my campaign consultant Jim Rivaldo, and my friend Matthew Rothschild. With each precinct that reported, and between bites of pasta, they would update the tally on the paper tablecloth.

  Modern campaigns rely on big data, analytics, and sophisticated voter turnout models. But in my experience, I’ve found that a friend, a pen, and a bowl of spaghetti are just as effective.

  We were getting ready to leave when Maya grabbed my arm. A new update had come in.

  “Oh, my God, you did it!” she exclaimed. “You made the runoff!” I did the math myself to make sure she was right. I remember looking at Maya and Maya looking at me and both of us saying, “Can you believe it—we’re really in this!”

  The runoff was held five weeks later. It rained that day, and I spent it getting soaked as I shook hands with voters at bus stops. That night, as I’d hoped, we won a decisive victory.

  We held a party at campaign headquarters, and I walked out to speak as “We Are the Champions” blasted through the room. Looking out at the crowd—friends, family, mentors, volunteers from the campaign—I saw one community. There were people from the poorest neighborhoods and the richest. Police officers alongside advocates fighting for police reform. Young people cheering with senior citizens. It was a reflection of what I’ve always believed to be true: when it comes to the things that matter most, we have so much more in common than what separates us.

  * * *

  • • •

  At the time of this writing, it’s been almost fifteen years since my inauguration as district attorney. I have spent almost every day since working, in some way or another, on reforming the criminal justice system. I spent two terms in its pursuit as district attorney and nearly two terms as attorney general, and I introduced criminal justice reform legislation within my first six weeks as a United States senator. Though I understood, fully, that inauguration morning in 2004, how important the issues were to me, I never could have imagined that they would lead me from San Francisco to Sacramento to Washington, DC.

  My inauguration ceremony for district attorney took place in the Herbst Theatre, in the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center—the same stage where the United Nations Charter had been signed in 1945. Now we were making a different kind of history, but unity was still the message of the day. My mother stood between me and Ronald George, the Republican chief justice of the California Supreme Court, who I chose to swear me in. My strongest memory is of looking at her and seeing the pure pride on her face.

  The room was packed to overflowing, hundreds of people from all corners of the city. Drummers drummed. A youth choir sang. One of my pastors gave a beautiful invocation. Chinese dragon dancers roamed the aisles. The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus serenaded us all. It was multicultural, multiracial, a little frenzied in all the best and most beautiful ways.

  Jerry Brown, then mayor of Oakland, was sitting in the front row; he told me that his father had taken the same oath of office sixty years ago to the day. And with Gavin Newsom’s swearing-in as mayor the same day as mine, there was a palpable sense in the city that a new chapter was opening for San Francisco politics—and what might be possible for us all.

  I made my way through the crowd, shaking hands and getting hugs and taking in the joy of it all. As the festivities were winding down, a man came up to me with his two young daughters.

  “I brought them here today,” he said, “so they could see what someone who looked like them could grow up to do.”

  After the inauguration, I snuck away to see my new office. I wanted to know what it felt like to sit in the chair. My communications director, Debbie Mesloh, and I drove to the Hall of Justice. Standing right next to the freeway, “850” as it was known (for 850 Bryant Street), was a gray, solemn, and imposing building; I used to joke that it was a “horribly wonderful” place to work. In addition to the district attorney’s office, the building housed the police department, the criminal courts, the city tow office, the county jail, and the city coroner’s office. There was no doubt this was a place where people’s lives were changed, sometimes forever.

  “Oh, wow.” I surveyed my office. Or, more accurately, I looked around the empty room. It had been stripped of almost everything as part of the transition. A metal cabinet sat against one wall with a 1980s Wang computer on top of it. (Mind you, it was 2004.) No wonder the office hadn’t gotten email yet. A plastic-lined wastebasket stood in the corner; a few loose wires stuck out of the floor. Out the window of my new office I could see a row of bail bonds businesses—a daily reminder of the ways in which the criminal justice system is more punishing to the poor. There was no desk in the office, just a chair where the desk had been. But that was okay. It was the chair I had come for. I took my seat.

  Now it was quiet. And for the first time since the day began, I was alone with my thoughts, taking it all in, contemplating the surreal.

  I had run because I knew I could do the job—and I believed I could do it better than it had been done. Still, I knew I represented something much bigger than my own experience. At the time, there weren’t many district attorneys who looked like me or had my background. There still aren’t. A report in 2015 found that 95 percent of our country’s elected prosecutors were white, and 79 percent were white men.

  No part of me would more fully inform my perspective than the decade I had spent on the front lines of the criminal justice system as a line prosecutor. I knew it backward and forward. For what it was, for what it wasn’t, and for what it could be. The courthouse was supposed to be the epicenter o
f justice; but it was often a great epicenter of injustice. I knew both to be true.

  I had been around the courtroom long enough to see victims of violence show up years later as perpetrators of violence. I worked with children who had grown up in neighborhoods so crime ridden that they had rates of PTSD as high as those growing up in war zones. I had worked with kids in foster care who changed homes six times before turning eighteen. I had seen them run away, from one bad circumstance into another, only to get caught in the gears of the system, with no prospect for breaking free. I had seen children marked for a bleak future solely because of the circumstances of their birth and the zip codes in which they lived. As deputy DA, my job had been to hold violators of the law accountable. But didn’t the system owe them and their communities some accountability, too?

  What the system doled out instead was an era of mass incarceration that has further devastated already disadvantaged communities. The United States puts more people in prison than any country in the world. All told, we had more than 2.1 million people locked up in state and federal prisons in 2018. To put that in perspective: there are fifteen American states that have smaller populations than that. The war on drugs pulled a lot of people into the system; it turned the criminal justice system into an assembly line. I saw it up close.

  Early in my career, I was assigned to a part of the Alameda County DA’s office known as the bridge, where lawyers in small offices would handle drug cases by the hundreds. There were bad actors in the piles, to be sure, plenty of dealers selling to kids or forcing kids to sell for them. But too many case files told a different story: a man arrested for simple possession of a few rocks of crack, a woman arrested for being under the influence while sitting on her stoop.

  The cases were as easy to prove as they were tragic to charge. In the rush to clean up the streets, we were criminalizing a public health crisis. And without a focus on treatment and prevention, the crack epidemic spread like a deadly virus, burning through city after city until it had stolen a generation of people.