As President-Elect Joe Biden and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris assemble the people, resources and programs that they will bring to the White House in January, they will create tremendous possibilities and opportunities for all Americans. This is true even for those who did not vote for them.
In the Biden-Harris ticket and eventual administration, America sees itself comprehensively reflected. America is a diverse country and, though Joe Biden and Kamala Harris do not tick off all of the boxes, between them and their families, they represent more than any previous administration in history.
Representation matters. One of the secrets to the success of women’s colleges and HBCUs is that their students see people like them in every leadership position possible. When people have said over the centuries that women or Black Americans cannot do something, what they have always meant was that they had never seen women or Black people doing the job in question. Yet.
As an educator and president of a women’s college, I have witnessed great change over the years. As a child of the 1960s, I only knew women to be teachers, secretaries, or nurses. Over my lifetime, women have entered professions and risen to positions falling just short of the highest in the land. I have seen how important it is for a young woman to see other women embracing new roles and doing jobs that other women have not yet done because it expands the possibilities that she imagines for herself.
Personally and professionally, Kamala Harris presents a particularly powerful example of the nature and the promise of America. It is significant that she obtained her undergraduate education from an HBCU and that her mother, a noted biomedical scientist, had earned her undergraduate degree at a women’s college. Harris has talked about the experience of being raised by an incredibly accomplished woman who came to the United States as an immigrant and has stated that it was her mother’s example that opened up a world of possibilities for her and her sister. Her late mother both helped her imagine–and provided a role model and exemplar of the fact—that anything was possible.
Vice President-Elect Harris’ own identity resists the kind of easy categorization that people prefer: White or Black or Asian or Hispanic. As the child of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, Harris defies the box altogether. She is proudly Asian, proudly Black, but genuinely American in the melding of heritage and experiences.
The diversity she brings is not just an asset for young women of color, but is also something powerful and good for all of us and for our country. This is because broad representation in our leadership matters. The informed viewpoints and richer perspectives increase the likelihood that these experiences may be reflected in the creation of public policy decisions that benefit all Americans. When the perspectives and the needs of only a portion of the population are the focus of policy, all of us lose out, even those in the privileged minority or majority.
