![]() Maya is widely respected in progressive criminal justice circles both for the official positions she’s held and the behind-the-scenes work she’s done that has often gone unacknowledged. In 2014, while a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, she wrote an influential paper on women of color as a growing force in the American electorate. But their careers have existed on distinct and, at times, colliding paths. They were raised in tight-knit black communities in Berkeley and Oakland by their immigrant Indian mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher. The sisters, who are two and a half years apart, have by all accounts always been close. But it also speaks to how Kamala will likely address the swirling controversies over how her work has impacted low-income black communities and how the lessons from Clinton’s 2016 campaign will either help or hinder her bid for the White House. That she chose her sister to lead her campaign speaks to how central family, and criminal justice reform, have been in both their lives and will be in their futures. In the few weeks since Kamala announced her historic run for the presidency, her candidacy has been the tale of two divergent perspectives on the left: Either she’s a “ cop” who takes unusual joy in punishing poor black mothers-as at least one widely shared tweet thread bluntly argued-or, as suggested by the slew of home state endorsements she’s earned from California politicians, she’s a seasoned political veteran with just enough national standing and charisma to meaningfully take on Donald Trump. ![]() Baked within that is the seemingly arduous task of building a coalition of support among racial and criminal justice advocates, many of whom are weary of Kamala’s record as a career prosecutor-first for Alameda County, then the city of San Francisco, and later as district attorney for San Francisco and eventually attorney general of California. ![]() Now, Maya Harris faces what is arguably the greatest challenge of her career: chairing the presidential campaign of her older sister, Kamala. “If you are fortunate to have opportunity, it’s your responsibility to make those opportunities available to other people as well and to use your power, your privilege, your position to improve lives for other people,” she said in a 2012 discussion. She would sit back at campaign headquarters and sigh. Along the way she would counsel other young black mothers on how to strategically utilize their support systems for necessities like child care while they worked or finished school. She’d go on to lead the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and earn a reputation as one of the most respected civil rights advocates in the country. She finished undergrad at the University of California-Berkeley and then law school at Stanford with her young daughter in tow before becoming one of the youngest-ever law school deans, at Lincoln Law School in San Jose, California, when she was just 29 years old. A biracial black woman from Oakland, Harris had been a bookish kid who became a single mom at 17. ![]() It was her first official position on a political campaign, and she was a fairly unorthodox operative. ![]() Harris was one of three senior policy advisers to Clinton in 2016, responsible for criminal justice reform, immigration, and reproductive health. Sometimes the passages being tweeted at her people were the exact words she’d pored over, draft after draft, in The New Jim Crow, written by her longtime friend from law school, Michelle Alexander. In the thick of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign for president-when the candidate tried and often failed to land her message of criminal justice reform with young voters of color, when activists were calling on her to account for her previous support of her husband’s crime bill that devastated black communities two decades earlier, when the terms “mass incarceration” and “new Jim Crow” were becoming the buzzwords to define the wreckage Clinton herself was said to symbolize-Maya Harris would sit back at campaign headquarters in Brooklyn and sigh. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. ![]()
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