Two weeks after a deadly insurrection put on display the White outrage that threatens the country's multiracial democracy, a dramatically different scene unfolded at the US Capitol.
On January 20, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn into office.
The inauguration of the first female, first Black and first South Asian vice president following the aforementioned assault did two things at once -- marked a hopeful turning point in the long fight for racial representation and justice, and underscored in sobering fashion that confronting White supremacy will be one of the new administration's main challenges.
Harris' political rise even just over the past one and a half years is nothing to scoff at. Maybe most obviously, the former California senator's ascent to the vice presidency will change the face of power in a literal way.
There was no shortage of coverage of how the 2020 Democratic primary field, which Harris was a part of, began as one of the most noteworthy in history. More specifically, the diversity of the slate of candidates who vied for the nomination was unprecedented: Latino, Asian, Black, gay, female. In December 2019, though, Harris suspended her campaign, as the field gradually congealed around straightness and Whiteness and maleness.
It was no small thing, then, when Biden chose Harris as his running mate in August. "It just feels like Black girls like me can run for class president. Black girls like me can go for the big things in life like she did," Paris Bond, a teenager, told CNN that month.
Or as Harris' late mother used to say to her barrier-busting daughter: "Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you're not the last."
Just as moving: when the Democratic duo trounced Trump in the November general election. Propelled by a multiracial coalition, Biden and Harris not only thwarted the reelection campaign of a man who used his Whiteness as a weapon -- they also ended the perverse pageantry of an administration that embraced virulent masculinity.
But as vice president, Harris will be able to offer more than symbolic representation.
"Joe Biden's vice president will most likely be the most powerful vice president in history because the trend is toward more powerful vice presidents. Joe Biden knows the value of having a vice president with lots of responsibility, and Joe Biden is going to inherit an epic disaster," as former Barack Obama senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said last year, referring to the nightmarish toll of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Already, Harris has indicated how she'll battle the once-in-a-century crisis and its attendant racial disparities -- disparities that are the result of a history of discriminatory policy.
Last May, she introduced the Covid-19 Racial and Ethnic Disparities Task Force Act to "bring together healthcare and other policy experts, community-based organizations, and federal, state, local, tribal and territorial leaders to confront the racial and ethnic disparities of this pandemic head on."
In December, Biden selected Marcella Nunez-Smith, an associate professor of internal medicine, public health and management at Yale University, to lead the health equity task force.
"Health care free of racism and discrimination is a right and not a privilege," Nunez-Smith said during a web briefing last month. "It is time for us to respond to the crisis of discrimination in health care."
In other words, Harris will change what power looks like and directly influence whom it serves.
