DNC: Kamala Harris accepts Democrats' vice president nomination in historic speech

 

SCREEN CAPTURE / NBC

Vice President nominee Kamala Harris

For the second tine in a week, Kamala Harris made history. The first time was when Joe Biden chose her as the first black woman, first Asian American woman and first black woman as his vice president; the second time was Wednesday night (Aug. 19) when she accepted the Democratic Party's nomination.

Speaking virtually from Wilmington, Delaware, Harris told the Democratic National Convention and the rest of the nation of her Indian American immigrant mother, Shymala Gopalan Harris, and how she and her sister grew up in the midst of the civil rights protests occurring in Oakland and Berkeley. Calif.

Her mother, who raised her daughters by herself after divorcing her father, taught Harris and her sister, Maya, “to believe public service is a noble cause and the fight for justice is a shared responsibility.”

"She raised us to be proud, strong black women. And she raised us to know and be proud tof our Indian heritage." 

“I keep thinking about that 25-year-old Indian woman — all of five feet tall — who gave birth to me at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, California,” Harris said. “On that day, she probably could have never imagined that I would be standing before you now speaking these words: I accept your nomination for vice president of the United States of America.”

Harris spoke about the values her mother taught her:

“To walk by faith, and not by sight, And to a vision passed on through generations of Americans, one that Joe Biden shares, a vision of our nation as a beloved community where all are welcome no matter what we look like, no matter where we come from or who we love.”

Then she turned to the kind of leadership that she, with Joe Biden as President, would offer and some of the issues they would address, including the national reckoning on race spurred by the death of George Floyd that gave new energy to the Black Lives Movement.

“This virus has no eyes, and yet it knows exactly how we see each other — and how we treat each other,” the California senator said. “And let’s be clear — there is no vaccine for racism. We’ve gotta do the work.”

"For George Floyd. For Breonna Taylor. For the lives of too many others to name -- for our children, for all of us."

"We've got to do the work to fulfill that promise of equal justice under law. Because, none of us are free until all of us are free," she said.

“Years from now, this moment will have passed,” she concluded. “And our children and our grandchildren will look in our eyes and ask us: Where were you when the stakes were so high? They will ask us, ‘What was it like?’ And we will tell them. We will tell them not just how we felt. We will tell them what we did.”

Prior to Harris groundbreaking acceptance speech, former President Barack Obama spoke from National Constitution Center in Philadelphia in strongly denouncing Donald Trump.Obama's unprecedented dressing down of Trump was delivered with a trace of sadness

“I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care,” said Obama, .

“But he never did,” Obama lamented. “He’s shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves. Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t.”