August 2019 | Rolling Stone | 73
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: HILARY SWIFT/”THE NEW YORK TIME
S”/REDUX; COURTESY
OF KAMALA HARRIS; KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF KAMALA HARRISFor Harris, it’s her record that could be an issue.
She has been under fire for policies that she cham-
pioned during her time as San Francisco DA, and
later, as California’s attorney general. The state law,
which went into effect in 2011, made parents liable
for a $2,000 fine or up to a year in jail for their chil-
dren’s truancy. She saw the role of prosecutor, and
of governance, in an activist light. “When I took on
an issue like truancy, I’m going to tell you why,” Har-
ris says matter-of-factly. “Because there are a bunch
of black and brown babies who are being neglected
by a system because nobody expects anything from
them anyway. Children are missing 50, 60, up to 80
days of a 180-day school year. Beautiful, smart chil-
dren with great capacity. If that had been in some
rich neighborhood, the alarms would’ve been going
off. So I decided to take the issue on, because I know
what those babies are capable of.”
Eight years after the fact, the senator still feels that
the law, though it went awry, was rooted in noble
purpose. “It was all about putting the attention on
the system,” she continues. “Not one parent went to
jail. I would’ve never let that happen. It was about
saying that these children going without an educa-
tion is tantamount to a crime being committed by
the whole system and society. I’m not going to stand
by and just watch something like that happen. If allthose other people were so interested in saving those
children, why weren’t they helping to save those chil-
dren? Don’t come at me now and talk to me about
that. Where were you then? And where are you now?
Are you looking and paying attention to what’s going
on in communities around this country?”
The complications for Harris arise when she notes
that even as she tried to use the system to change
things for the better, her inability to control that sys-
tem led to negative consequences. People were ar-
rested, folks did go to jail, and Harris later offered a
mea culpa for those jurisdictions in which district at-
torneys have criminalized parents, telling CNN that
it “was never the intention.” But what matters more:
intent, or effect?
University of San Francisco law professor Lara Ba-
zelon wrote a damning critique in a New York Times
op-ed published just days before the Harris cam-
paign launched in January, accusing Harris of hid-
ing a regressive record on wrongful-conviction cases
under her “progressive prosecutor” image. (Harris
says that Bazelon “never contacted us” prior to pub-
lishing the op-ed. “It was my opinion,” the professor
tells ROLLING STONE. “Harris has not been able to
factually refute a single claim in my piece. That’s be-
cause what I wrote is true.”) However, Bazelon’s spe-
cific critique was soon buried under the reductivecries of “Kamala is a cop!” and other similar phras-
es and headlines that erupted thereafter. As much
as Harris’ record should be examined, it should be
noted that outrage itself can be exploited for politi-
cal gain by the opportunistic.
But what if the white middle-class voters who
Biden would so desperately like to secure would ac-
tually like a former prosecutor behind the Resolute
Desk? And what if Democrats trust Harris with the
job? Maybe even because her argument proves to be
fundamentally correct: The American system of juris-
prudence — and, perhaps more broadly, our society
— was built to undermine people who look like Kama-
la Harris, and it would be best to have someone who
has her experience in charge of changing it.L
ATEEFAH SIMON, an Oakland community or-
ganizer and self-described radical, was a
Kamala Harris skeptic who “had spent my
whole career fighting the DA.” Simon met Harris at
the start of the senator’s prosecutorial career in Ala-
meda County, “which was notorious for doing all the
wrong things with our people.” Black people, young
women, folks who were marginalized. If Simon was
us, Harris was them.
That is why it surprises some to learn that Simon
came to work alongside Harris for years in the San
Francisco district attorney’s office in 2005, helping
create Back on Track, a nationally recognized pro-
gram that offered an alternative to incarceration for
low-level, nonviolent drug offenders.
Now a Bay Area Rapid Transit board member and
the president of the Akonadi Foundation — an orga-
nization that supports social-change movements —
Simon says Harris convinced her what good a prose-
cutor could do within the criminal-justice apparatus.
“ ‘The DA is not the devil. What we can do in here is
try to make some structural change,’ ” she recalls Har-
ris telling her early on. “I know what we changed in
the office, I know what we couldn’t change. And still,
to this day with my policy-activism credentials, I ride
with her because she knows, more than anybody,
the dualities of wrong and right and racialized strife.”
Harris has embraced her blackness in a conspic-
uous way that candidates running for any office, let
alone the presidency, do not often do. A proud alum
of the historically black Howard University and an
Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sister, Harris is greeted
with frequent chants of “H-U!” and “skee-wee!” at her
events. File “presidential candidate enters a conven-
tion hall advanced by a fully decked-out drum line”
under things I thought I’d never see. But that is pre-
cisely what Harris does in late June at the South Car-
olina Democratic Convention, before letting loose a
message that dramatically departs from her prosecu-
torial rhetoric and ties civil-rights progress to the for-
tunes of the United States as a whole.
“We have in this White House a president who says
he wants to make America great again,” Harris told
the crowd in South Carolina. “Well, what does that
mean? Does that mean he wants to take us back to
before schools were integrated? Does that mean he
wants to take us back to before the Voting Rights Act
was enacted? Does that mean he wants to take us
back before the Civil Rights Act was enacted? Does
he mean he wants to take us back before Roe v. Wade
was enacted? Because we’re not going back. We’re
not going back!” [Cont. on 97]ON THE TRAIL Harris campaigning in Iowa, making
her case that she’s best able to prosecute Trump. “The
founders presupposed there would be a moment when
an executive might abuse his authority,” she says.CAMPUS ACTIVIST
Harris attended historically
black Howard University
in Washington, D.C.,
where she protested
South African apartheid
almost every weekend
of her freshman year.LAW AND ORDER
She served as attorney
general of California
for six years: “I believe
people want to know
that when you have that
kind of power, you are
respectful of it.”BERKELEY CHILDHOOD
Harris was raised along
with a younger sister by her
mom in Berkeley. “They got
that political ire-and-fire
from following their mother
to campaigns on campus,”
says a family friend.