That's why Kamala Harris the #BlackLivesMatter doesn't like it
She is the first woman and the first African American to hold the role of vice president of the United States, and the enthusiasm of a large portion of Americans is skyrocketing. But Kamala Harris hardly likes the active anti-racism movement #BlackLivesMatter: here's why
Cencompassed by apparently unanimous enthusiasm, the new Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris - the first woman and at the same time the first African American to fill a similar role - is preparing to face one of the most difficult times in American history.
Shaken by pandemics and unrest of all sorts, the United States, however, seems to be facing what many presented as a "new era", characterized by the incoming number one of the White House Joe Biden, with a completely opposite line to that of the tycoon Donald Trump and his cover excesses.
Shortly before the triumph, then Senator Harris announced her intention, once elected, to "reinvent the way we manage public security in America."
Indeed, looking back over the past few months, one cannot ignore his tough battles against Republican Rand Paul, who blocked a bill aimed at making lynching a federal crime, as well as his commitment to introduce internal police legislation that prohibit methods of arrest at risk of suffocation and the so-called "racial profiling".
All battles that made Kamala Harris emerge as one of the main voices involved in combating police misconduct, for many a true historical plague in the United States, central in a similar period.
Yet it was not always like this, quite the contrary. A superficial press analysis focusing on the last 10 years of his political activity is enough to understand why the #BlakLivesMatter doesn't like the new vice president at all.
Since 2011, when he assumed the post of California attorney general, he has systematically avoided intervening in cases of police killings. So much so that it became a negative reference of the anti-racist movement, which explicitly invited Harris to "do her job: prosecute the murderous cops!".
In 2014, in the midst of the national outrage fueled by the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, part of the public close to the #BlakesLiveMatter and beyond launched a real campaign of pleading addressed to Harris, to investigate on a series of police shootings in San Francisco, where she had previously served as a district attorney. She did not intervene: "Except for extraordinary circumstances - he explained - this has nothing to do with my work".
Daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father who met in Berkeley, in the social protest movement of the 1960s, Kamala Harris was sworn in as San Francisco District Attorney in 2004, and has always said she became a prosecutor to "change the system from within ".
But both as a district attorney and as an attorney general she found herself constantly negotiating a middle ground between two powerful forces: the police and the left, in one of America's most liberal states. The results? Not revolutionary at all and, to be honest, much more conservative than progressive, with a 'pro-police line regardless' which more than once aroused great perplexity.
But now the change of course seems undeniable: he fights against agent abuse and racial labels, calls for more powers to investigate police misconduct, and has recently publicly expressed frustration that the agents who killed Breonna Taylor, black woman from Kentucky, "have not yet received a formal indictment."
But all of this raises some crucial questions, as the New York Times first points out just hours after her election: Is Kamala Harris essentially just a more pragmatic policy or has it really changed? Are you the woman who will lead a police reform from the White House? And how far can it go forward to do so with such a past?
