Is the United States of America going to pick the first Black woman as its president in the November elections this year?
The USA is ready for the historic moment, claimed Vice President Kamala Harris, who will be officially confirmed as the Democratic US presidential nominee in Chicago next week.
“In my entire career, I’ve heard people say when I ran… people aren’t ready, it’s not your time, nobody like you has done that before,” the Democrat, who will be officially confirmed as presidential nominee in Chicago next week, said in 2019 when she ran against Joe Biden in the primary presidential campaign.
“I haven’t listened and I would suggest that nobody should listen to that kind of conversation.”
But Harris’s campaign never took off and she left the primaries race before Biden picked her as his running mate.
If Harris, 59, manages to beat Donald Trump in November, she will become the first woman and the second Black person, after Barack Obama, to run the world’s leading power.
In so many ways, Harris already is a trailblazer. Born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, she was the first woman attorney general ever elected in California, on top of being the first African American and Asian American to hold that post. She then became the first vice president in US history in those same categories.
In a survey published in September 2023, the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank, found that for a majority of Americans, gender does not play a role in choosing a president.
Sixty per cent of respondents said that a female president would handle pressure as well as a man, while 27 per cent believed that she would do better.
“While female leadership — whether as presidents, queens, prime ministers, and heads of state — has become the norm in many parts of the world, including Europe, Asia, South America, and African nations, the United States has yet to experience this moment,” said Sonia Gipson Rankin, a law professor at the University of New Mexico.—Agencies
