Kamala Harris made history on Wednesday when she was sworn in as Joe Biden's vice president, becoming the first woman, the first Black American and the first Asian American to hold the second highest US office.
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A US senator from California the past four years, Harris has shattered many a glass ceiling. She served as San Francisco's first female district attorney and was California's first woman of color to be elected attorney general. Harris has resigned her Senate seat, but she still will play a prominent role in the chamber. The U.S. vice president serves as Senate president, casting any tie-breaking votes in the 100-member chamber. With it split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, Harris gives her party control of the Senate.
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Harris, at 56 a full generation younger than Biden, also imparts a youthful persona and diversity. She has Jamaican and Indian ancestry .
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Asked on the CBS program "60 Minutes" last year why, given Biden's age, he believed Harris would be ready to step into the presidency if something happened to him, Biden rapidly fired off five reasons. "Number one, her values. Number two, she is smart as a devil, and number three, she has a backbone like a ramrod. Number four, she is really principled. And number five, she has had significant experience in the largest state in the union in running the justice department that's only second in size to the United States Justice Department. And obviously, I hope that never becomes a question," Biden said. | Above: Vice President Kamala Harris bumps fists with Joe Biden after she was sworn in during the inauguration, at the US Capitol in Washington.
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Harris is married to attorney Douglas Emhoff, who has adopted the Twitter handle @SecondGentleman. His two children from a previous marriage refer to their stepmother as "Momala."
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Born in the US to immigrants, cancer researcher Shyamala Gopalan from India and economics professor Donald Harris from Jamaica, Harris has leaped in a generation to running for a position that could put her a heartbeat away from the presidency. After her parents divorced when she was only seven, Harris was brought up by her mother, whom she has described as "tough and fierce and protective" yet "generous and loyal and funny," and credits her for her success.
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Harris' record as a prosecutor - she was the San Francisco district attorney from 2004 to 2011, and the California attorney general from 2011 to 2017 - was a major theme of her presidential campaign. She has said she became a prosecutor because she believed she could best change the system from within, a message that became a key part of her pitch as a presidential candidate.
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This undated photo provided by the Kamala Harris campaign in April 2019 shows her as a child at her mother's lab in Berkeley, Calif. (Kamala Harris campaign via AP)
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In this undated photo provided by the Kamala Harris campaign in April 2019, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, 25, holds her baby, Kamala. Moving from New Delhi to Berkeley for her PhD in the tumultuous era of the 1960s civil rights movements, Shyamala Gopalan [Kamala’s mother] joined the protests "with a sense of justice imprinted on her soul."
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In this April 1965 photo provided by the Kamala Harris campaign, Donald Harris holds his daughter, Kamala. Shyamala's relationship with fellow-activist Donald Harris grew under the clamour of the protests and Kamala Harris recalls, "My parents often brought me in a stroller with them to civil rights marches."
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This September 1966 photo provided by the Kamala Harris campaign shows her during a family visit to the Harlem neighborhood of New York. (Kamala Harris campaign via AP)
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This Dec. 25, 1968 photo provided by the Kamala Harris campaign shows her with her sister, Maya, on Christmas. While the African American identity became the dominant one - and, in fact, the one that boosted her chances to the get the vice presidential nomination - Harris wrote, "Our classical Indian names harked back to our heritage and we were raised with a strong awareness of and appreciation for Indian culture." Her sister is also a lawyer.
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In this undated photo provided by the Kamala Harris campaign in April 2019, Iris Finegan holds her great granddaughter, Kamala Harris, in Jamaica. (Kamala Harris campaign via AP)
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This November 1982 photo provided by the Kamala Harris campaign shows her, right, with Gwen Whitfield at an anti-apartheid protest during her freshman year at Howard University in Washington. (Kamala Harris campaign via AP)
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January 1970 photo shows her, left, with sister Maya and mother Shyamala: She wrote, "My mother, grandparents, aunts and uncle instilled us with pride in our South Asian roots." "I was also very close to my mother's brother, Balu, and her two sisters, Sarala and Chinni (whom I called Chittis, which means 'younger mother' [in Tamil])," she recalled.
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Harris writes that her grandfather had also been a "freedom-fighter." She recalls visiting him as a child in Luska, where he had been sent by the Indian government in the late 1960s to help that young nation deal with a refugee crisis brought on by a renegade White supremacist government breaking away from Britain in neighbouring Southern Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwer after overthrowing them.
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This 2007 photo provided by the Kamala Harris campaign shows her with her mother, Shyamala, at a Chinese New Year parade. In this environment, she wrote, "My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya [and Kamala] as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women."
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New York: FILE - In this Thursday Feb. 21, 2019, file photo, then-Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., listens during a visit with civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton during lunch at Sylvia's Restaurant in the Harlem neighborhood of New York. Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden named Harris as his running mate, making history by selecting the first Black woman to compete on a major party's presidential ticket. AP/PTI Photo(AP12-08-2020_000046B)
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The former California attorney general is the first person of Indian descent in the running mate role, and personifies the diversity seen as key to building enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket, particularly in a year marked by a historic reckoning on race. She is the third female vice presidential nominee for a major party, after the groundbreaking but unsuccessful runs of Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Republican Sarah Palin in 2008. Hillary Clinton was the first female presidential nominee, losing to Trump in 2016.
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Elected to the Senate in 2016, Harris was the first Black woman in the chamber in more than a decade. During her relatively brief time as California's junior senator, she has become known for her intensive interrogations of Trump administration officials and nominees, including Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing and during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing with Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
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