Kamala Harris made history on Saturday with her election as Joe Biden’s vice president, becoming the first woman, first Black American and first Asian American to win the second highest U.S. office.
Harris, born in 1964 to a Jamaican father and Indian mother, spent much of her formative years in Berkeley, California.
She has often spoken of the deep bond she shared with her mother, whom she has called her single biggest influence.
Harris won her first election in 2003 when she became San Francisco’s district attorney. In that post, she created a re-entry program for low-level drug offenders and cracked down on student truancy.
She was elected California’s attorney-general in 2010, the first woman and black person to hold the job, and focused on issues including the foreclosure crisis.
She declined to defend the state’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage and was later overturned by the US
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