Opinion: Kamala Harris, Shirley Chisholm and Caribbean Americans’ dreams of change

Whenever change is in the air, it can feel challenging to keep our feet on the ground. But make no mistake: Caribbean Americans understand all too well that feet on the ground are the only way to move forward. And they are precisely what is needed to win in November. Since Vice President Kamala Harris launched her campaign to become president of the United States, our community has been swept up in the whirlwind of change. We have been canvassing the streets, organizing historically successful fundraisers, debating the issues at the dinner table and taking every step necessary to secure victory for our vice president and prosperity for our nation. Within each of us is a familiar, yet almost forgotten energy, as a daughter of the Diaspora, again, redefines possibility for a new generation. To this day, I remember when another redefined it for mine.

Whether you lived through it or learned of it, we each know what defined the America of my early life – and that is a palpable pain that saturated the everyday. At the time, our young people were being ceaselessly sent to an unthinkable slaughter a hemisphere away, the murders of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy were fresh and harsh in our memories and civil unrest permeated the nation. There are consequences to grief on the scale of those days, and it materialized in a grave aura of doubt that diffused into our daily lives. Even as a young girl, given only half the story and burdened by a fraction of the tragedy, I was keenly aware of the hardship my family and neighbors felt the full weight of.

And then, only months past my seventh birthday, my first taste of change came. It arrived when my congresswoman, Shirley Anita Chisholm, announced her candidacy for the presidency out of the Concord Baptist Church of Christ, just miles away from my childhood home in Flatbush. Already the first Black woman to hold a seat in Congress and now the first Black woman to run for president on a major party ticket, Chisholm’s unprecedented act of political courage did more than lift our community from the grave pessimism that punctuated those dark decades in American history – it inspired countless Caribbean Americans and Black Americans and all marginalized peoples of America to pursue the mantle of leadership in the decades that followed. In fact, it ignited my own journey in public service.

Little did I know, another 7-year-old, second-generation immigrant on our country’s other coast saw the same spectacle of courage and commitment. And because of one brave Barbadian American, two Jamaican Americans – one in Brooklyn and the other in Berkeley – were set forward towards a future we had never known we could dream of. We saw a Black woman take the first steps towards the White House. We saw the impossible become possible. We saw our value and ability personified by a spirited woman from Brooklyn, who was resolutely and unabashedly unbought and unbossed.

Though I had known Kamala Harris’ name and been familiar with her work long before we met, as fate would have it, our first opportunity to work alongside one another arose in a “full circle” moment, when we joined together to fight for a cause dear to both our hearts – our effort to place a statue of Chisholm in the United States Capitol. Two children of Jamaican dreams and the American Dream – my mother, from the Parish of St. Elizabeth, her father, from the Parish of St. Ann – on parallel paths of public service, collided in a fight to honor the woman who started it all. Indeed, I know the passion our vice president holds for her heritage. I know it, because it’s evident in every action she takes.

Harris is a woman who sees justice as precious and injustice as intolerable. These are tenets that define the Caribbean American community, and it is those very principles that have guided her work in the Biden-Harris Administration. Since the COVID-19 pandemic that put millions out of work, she has played a profound and unprecedented role in an administration that has produced 16 million good-paying jobs. In the aftermath of Roe’s fall, she has stood in the breach defending against existential attacks on women’s rights. She has helped pass landmark legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and she has remained resolutely at the side of Black Americans and the most vulnerable communities in our nation in the face of hate and persecution. She helped achieve the lowest Black unemployment rate on record and higher Black enrollment in healthcare coverage than ever before. Not to mention, she was right there, watching and working, as the first Black woman ascended to the Supreme Court of the United States.

At her side in this campaign stands Gov. Tim Walz, a 24-year veteran of the Army National Guard and a man who has devoted his life and career to the underserved and the overlooked. Tim and I entered Congress in the same class and, from the outset, it was clear to me that he is a man of unwavering principles and inherent goodness. To deny his service to our nation is to deny the very concept of service itself. Together, these two lifelong public servants have emerged as champions of the causes and communities most dear to them – and those most in need of champions. 

From dismay and dismal hopes, Harris lifted our nation up with a message of unapologetic joy, unbridled hope and the promise of change – the same promise I first heard at only 7 years old. I know somewhere in this great nation, there is a young girl who has waited for change her entire life, who is now eager to grow up and do something with it. Like myself, and like Vice President Harris. Today, as we continue our march through this new era of American political history, I have found myself thinking again on what that special moment in 1972 meant to me and what it meant to our vice president. On reflection, I believe that was the day Shirley Chisholm showed us the future of our dreams. And today, Kamala Harris has let us dream of the future, again.