V.P. Kamala Harris Calls Education Doing God’s Work

In Sanskrit, Kamala means lotus; but in America, it means POTUS”

Das, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive democratic nominee for President of the United States, received the endorsement of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and vows to support the freedom of educators to provide instructional lessons regarding race and social justice issues in public education while she also promised to support the freedom of students to learn the unvarnished truth, to develop their critical thinking skills, and to formulate their own worldview based on an analysis of factual information as opposed to being forced to see America through rose-colored glasses.

Cecily Myart-Cruz, President of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, told the New York Times, “I saw people crying” (Goldstein and Nehamas, 2024); she said everyone was looking hopeful and the event was electric as Harris told the educators and her supporters in Houston, Texas on Thursday July 25th, “You all do God’s work, educating our children . . . It is you who have taken on the most noble of work, which is to concern yourself with the well-being of the Children of America” (Harris, 2024). Harris thanked her supporters for their servant leadership and labor of love and said that while they are doing the Work of The Lord, teaching our children about our nation’s history, Donald Trump and his MAGA-maniacs are attacking the “freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation’s true and full history” by banning books “in this year of Our Lord 2024” (Harris, 2024) and banning Advanced Placement Courses on African American studies in which high school students can earn college credits.

Florida, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Georgia are among the states that have created legislation restricting and causing complications for schools endeavoring to engage in an open survey of the multitude of complexities that is American History. Education Week reports that Georgia is trying to walk back on their stance after first declaring that all AP Courses on African American Studies were ineligible to receive state funding. On Wednesday, July 24th, Richard Woods, the Republican Superintendent of Schools in Georgia, announced that schools will be eligible to receive state funding for AP courses if they use the same code issued for courses that are not AP (Najarro, 2024). It remains to be seen if high school courses that are not coded AP will be recognized as such by the College Board.

Georgia State Senator Nikki Merritt did not think so and expressed her concerns, saying that financing for the program was only part of the problem and that an AP course on African American Studies should be treated just like every other AP Course. “No other AP class is treated this way,” Merritt said (Najarro, 2024). Yet, equity is not one of the values of The Right who have called the Vice President a “D.E.I. hire” (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and have referred to her as a “childless cat lady,” while Trump, the man who suggested that people should inject Lysol into their bodies to fight the Corona Virus had the temerity to call Kamala Harris “dumb as a rock,” The bigoted, misogynistic mudslinging is expected to get worse; but V.P. Harris is up to the task. Her name, Kamala, means Lotus, one of the world’s most beautiful flowers that only grow out of the mud. Many Indian-Americans are proudly boasting, “In Sanskrit, Kamala means lotus; but in America, it means POTUS [President of the United States]” (Das, 2024). So Trump and the Republicans can keep slinging mud, Kamala shall rise above it all and defeat him in the November election.

Political Analyst Juanita Tolliver told MSNBC on 26 July 2024 that former Presidential Candidate, “Shirley Chisholm said in 1969 that the first woman will be elected president when men step aside and women and young people unite.” In response to a cacophony of harsh criticism and many editorials and press releases from high ranking members of the Democratic Party to elicit his resignation from the Presidential Race on the heels of a disastrous, lethargic, debate performance, an incident that appeared to give evidence that The President had grown extremely geriatric and was incapable of serving as chief executive for another term, President Joe Biden assented to step aside and suspend his campaign for re-election and dropped out of the race, consigning all his pledged delegates and all the financial contributions he had received, along with his imprimatur and endorsement to the first female Vice President of the United States of America, causing nearly ninety thousand Black Women to unite on Zoom and raise 1.6 million dollars, approximately forty thousand Black Men to unite on Zoom and raise 1.5 million dollars, and one hundred sixty thousand White Women for Harris, including Cat Ladies for Kamala, to meet on Zoom and raise two million dollars. Asian Women and Latinas for Harris have also united and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. Harris raised more than three hundred million dollars in two weeks. There were more than one hundred thousand new registered voters and more than fifty thousand volunteers who signed up to work her Campaign in the first week (Ramer, 2024).

Kamala Harris is poised yet again to make history as the first Female American President. Women were not allowed to vote until the 19th Amendment in 1920 granted them suffrage. One hundred years later, Vice President Kamala Harris shattered that glass ceiling. Always facing challenges with class, grace, dignity, and a positive, affirmative attitude, Harris said, I “have been told many times during my career things from ‘you are too young; it’s not your turn; they are not ready for you; no one like you has done it before.’ I have heard all of those things many times over the course of my career, but I didn’t listen. I eat ‘no’ for breakfast” (Harris, 2020).

And now she is ready to eat Donald Trump for lunch. Biden had been losing support in the polls, and Trump had been maintaining a steady lead, but Harris has interjected a load of energy into the race and is perfectly prepared to be the next president and to prosecute the case against Donald Trump. She said, “As many of you know, before I was elected as vice president, before I was elected as United States senator, I was the elected attorney general; . . . before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, and cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type” (Harris, 2024).

A demagogue who has used racism and stoked the fiery fears of prejudice to rise to political relevance, Trump took over the Republican Party when Barack Obama was President, acting as his harshest adversary, promulgating the proposition that Obama was not an American and should not be president because his father was an African man from Kenya. Trump is at it again, now claiming that Kamala Harris is not Black and that she just recently “turned Black” (ABC News). Yet, during attempts to integrate California schools and bus African American children from the Black suburban town of Berkeley to the white suburban school in Thousand Oaks in 1970, Kamala, a first-grader then, was one of the little Black girls on the bus (Bowles, 2019). Those children were forced to take a forty-minute bus ride to school every day, just as they were forced to live in South and West Berkeley because of redlining (Barber, 2018; Ousilas, 2020).

Kamala’s California home, “a small yellow duplex located at 1227 Bancroft Way, between Browning and Bonar Streets,” was in a middle-class neighborhood of mostly African American and Indian American families (Ousilas, 2020) where no one questioned their race, ethnicity, or their family heritage.

Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1964. She is the child of a Jamaican-American father, Dr. Donald J. Harris, a retired Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and an Indian-American mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris (12/07/1938 – 02/11/2009), who specialized in breast cancer research. She has one sister, Maya (1/30/1967), who is also a lawyer. As children, the girls often visited their father's family in Jamaica and their mother's family in India. The family also moved around a lot as the parents worked at various universities. They left Berkely and moved to Illinois, where Maya was born, and where Kamala split her time in elementary school. They then moved to Quebec, Canada, when Kamala was twelve years old, where she attended and graduated from middle school and high school. She graduated from the HBCU – Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she pledged to the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. Her alma mater has reported a huge spike in entrance applications since she became Vice President (Byrne, 2020). After Howard, Kamala received her Juris Doctorate from The University of California Hastings College of The Law. She has been married for ten years to Douglas Emhoff, also an attorney, and she is the stepmother to his two grown children, Cole, 30, and Ella, 25, who refuses to call her their stepmother, choosing instead to call her Mamala. 

Vice President Harris promises to sustain our democracy and lead America to live out its creed that “All men and women are created equal” and that we are a nation of the people, for the people, by the people. She has traversed many obstacles, challenges, hurdles, and all stepping stones to stand on the platform that has her one step from being the most powerful person in the world. Not only has she shattered glass ceilings, she has knocked down the walls of subjugation and kicked open the walls of oppression so that others may follow her lead. She says, “My mother would look at me, and she’d say, ‘Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you are not the last’” (Harris, 2020).

V.P. Harris is living up to her mother’s advice. When she ran for president in 2020, she proposed a hefty investment of federal money in teacher salaries, saying that when she is elected president, the Department of Education will certainly not be disbanded but will create an elevated baseline teacher salary with federal funding. Under her plan, the average American teacher's salary will increase by nearly $14,000 (Herndon, 2019). Harris (2024) said, “You can judge a society by the way it treats its children . . . And one of the greatest expressions of love that a society can give its children is educating those children with the resources they need.” Harris is also doing God’s Work.


WORKS CITED

Bowles, N. (2019). New York Times. Kamala Harris and Classmates Were Bused Across
Berkeley. The Experience Changed Them. 30 June 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/30/us/politics/kamala-harris-berkeley-busing.html

Das, A. (2024). New York Times. Harris’s Indian Heritage Is Deeply Felt if Little Advertised.
24 July 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/world/asia/kamala-harris-india.html

Byrne, J.A. (2020). Poets and Quants. Why Kamala Harris Will Boost Howard University’s
Reputation. 14 December 2020. https://poetsandquants.com/2020/12/14/kamala-harris-is-now-howard-universitys-most-famous-alum-that-halo-will-impact-everything/

Goldstein, D. and Nehamas, N. (2024). New York Times. Harris Embraces Teachers’ Unions.
Republicans Sense an Opening: 25 July 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/25/us/kamala-harris-teachers-education.html

Harris, K.D. (2024). Whitehouse.gov. Remarks by Vice President Harris at the American
Federation Of Teachers’ 88th National Convention. 25 July 2024 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/07/25/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-the-american-federation-of-teachers-88th-national/

Harris, K.D. (2020). On CNBC. Kamala Harris on being told ‘it’s not your time’ in her career:
“I eat ‘no’ for breakfast.” 2 November 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/02/kamala-harris-on-naysayers-in-her-career-i-eat-no-for-breakfast.html

Harris, K.D. (2024). Whitehouse.gov. Remarks by Vice President Harris at a Political Event.
23 July 2024. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/07/23/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-a-political-event-10/

Harris Biographical Information:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/vice-president-harris/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Kamala-Harris

Herndon, A.W. (2019). New York Times. Kamala Harris’s First Campaign Policy: A Raise for
Teachers. 26 March 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/us/politics/kamala-harris-teacher-pay.html