How the Democrats dropped the ball once again

 Former Vice President and Democratic nominee Joe Biden selected Kamala Harris as his Vice President on Tuesday. f Biden is elected, Harris will become the first Black woman and South Asian woman vice president in the history of the United States. Due to this potentially historical moment, we've been told to let Black women have this moment as they've been ignored in our country since the beginning of time.

I'm going to talk about Harris's past and how it affected my family and many others. As you're reading this, know that I've had a brother that spent seven years in jail for a crime he did not commit. I also have a transgender sibling, as well as another gay brother. Each of them has been a victim of the agenda that the Democratic party has pushed in the past.

Social media painted a picture Tuesday that we need to appreciate Harris due to representation, and that doesn't sit right with me. I've been begging my close friends to raise the bar as we deserve so much better than this, and what the Democratic party has put forward is a prime example. 

Journalist Clarissa Brooks said so eloquently, "representation is not liberation. Having a black woman imperialist is not freedom. It never will be. We deserve so much more than this."

When somebody shows you who they are, believe them. When somebody shows you who they are countless times, hold them accountable. We've spent six months raising issues that have been around forever, from the wealth gap to defunding the police. Yet, on Tuesday, many of those same people were trying to convince us to be alright with voting for two people that have and will continue to solidify further those same systems we are arguing against. Why? "It's better than Trump."

What are we doing here?

Harris's brutal history involving marijuana

Harris was the District Attorney of San Francisco from 2004 through 2011.

The felony conviction rate rose under Harris, who inherited a conviction rate of 50%, to as high as 74% in 2006. There have been arguments on whether the number of marijuana convictions Harris had were low-level or not. Still, the D.A.'s office obtained more than 1,900 marijuana convictions during Harris's time as a D.A. Harris's successor, George Gascon, expunged all of San Francisco's marijuana offenses going back to 1975. Harris made a mockery of smoking marijuana when she went on the Breakfast Club and claimed to have smoked and inhaled marijuana before, essentially pandering to Black, young voters. Shortly after the interview, Harris's father said she disgraced her Jamaican family by using a false stereotype to joke about smoking weed. During the interview, when asked about smoking marijuana, Harris said, "half of my family's from Jamaica -- are you kidding me?" That led to Harris's father, a professor at Stanford University, saying that the senator's grandparents must be turning in their graves. Harris's father said this of his daughter:

"My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics."

He asked to be disassociated from Kamala's travesty. The last line speaks volumes about Harris as it's precisely what she's out to achieve: an identity in politics. However, through the years, she's fumbled every attempt and has been a hypocrite at seemingly every turn. In May of 2018, Harris said making marijuana legal at the federal level is the smart thing to do, as she announced her support for New Jersey Senator Cory Booker's Marijuana Justice Act. Based on her history of politics, that came as a surprise. To me, Harris's shift in her stance on marijuana is for her political gain. In 2010, Harris did not back a California measure that would have changed state law in favor of marijuana legalization. In 2014, Harris laughed when asked about another candidate’s support for legalizing marijuana. Harris also declined to support California's cannabis legalization ballot measure that voters went on to approve in 2016. What changed leading up to 2018? Her political agenda. 

Unfortunately for Harris, you cannot outrun your history.

During a Democratic debate, Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard claimed Harris blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. Gabbard also claimed Harris kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California, while fighting to keep a bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way. 

Harris has a lengthy history of locking up Black people for marijuana. Still, she's also gone out of her away to help the very people decide whether or not she and Biden are elected into office. Yet, we're being told to ignore Harris's past and expect her to all of a sudden fight for the same people she's prosecuted over the past 15+ years.

Labor exploitation 

Circling back to the exploitation of prisoners and their labor. In 2014, Harris's division had inmates fighting wildfires in California. In court, Harris's lawyers argued that freeing the prisoners would draining the state's source of cheap labor. Harris claimed that she did not have any knowledge, and the arguments that played out in court didn't reflect her priorities. That's laughable, and her history suggests otherwise. Harris's lawyers in her division pushed back against a federal order to expand an early parole program, arguing it would deplete their stock of prison labor, specifically those fighting the wildfires. Harris continued with the lip service, saying, "the war on drugs was a failure," even though she declined to join in other states' efforts to remove marijuana from the DEA's list of most-dangerous substances.

Time as an Attorney General

In January of 2010, Harris threatened parents with jail over their children being truant. I wish that were an exaggeration, but after Harris gained some political capital, that was one of her first talking points as Attorney General of California, where California's Department of Justice paid more than $1.1 million to settle claims with employees who alleged they were sexually harassed or retaliated against by co-workers during Harris's time as attorney general from 2011-2017. Harris took "full responsibility" for everything that occurred.

In 2015, Michelle-Lael Norsworthy, a transgender woman incarcerated, filed a federal lawsuit citing California's failure to prove the necessary SRS (sex reassignment surgery.) office filed a request in federal court to halt a court ruling that ordered Norsworthy’s surgery, arguing that “there is no evidence that irreversible treatment is immediately necessary before this appeal can be heard.: Harris's move to block the surgery was unsuccessful, and Norsworthy was the first incarcerated trans person in California to win a court ruling that granted a request for surgery.

Transition-related medical care is often not understood as health-affirming and necessary despite demonstrable improvements to the quality of life of many trans people who desire it. As medical groups and government agencies—including the American Psychiatric Association and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs—acknowledge the necessity of transition-related medical care, arguments made by the likes of Harris limiting access to it become even less defensible. To this day, Harris is still yet to answer the question without deflecting.

Marijuana isn't the only thing Harris has been accused of wrongful convictions. Harris did not support California's "Three Strikes Law' Inititivate or "Criminal Sentences" initiative, both of which are criminal sentencing-reforms. Harris argued it wouldn't be right as her office prepares the ballot booklets, but her predecessor, John Van De Kamp, publicly disagreed with her train of thought.

In 2013, Harris had an opportunity to prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank for foreclosure violations. At the California attorney general's office, prosecutors said they had found over a thousand violations of foreclosure laws by his bank during that time. Yet, Harris couldn't explain why she and her team didn't prosecute Mnunchin. Three years later, during the 2016 election, Harris was the only Democratic Senate candidate to receive a donation from Mnuchin, who was later voted as the U.S. secretary for Donald Trump. Nobody is naive enough to believe that was a coincidence. It gets better. President Trump and his daughter Ivanka made financial contributions to Harris's reelection campaign as California's attorney general. Trump donated $5,000 in 2011 and $1,000 in 2013. While Trump has donated to several Democrats prior to his presidential campaign, Harris is one of two people to receive a donation on the west coast.

In 2015, Harris sponsored a bill supporting seizing assets without proving they are illicit before a judge. Civil asset forfeiture allows police to seize money, property, and cars under a simple suspicion of being used for criminal activity. Do these cops need criminal charges? Nope. I can only imagine how many innocent people have been robbed of this. The bill has also led to funding police budgets with the seized property. Many dislike this bill, and have argued it's unconstitutional, yet, Harris has publicly supported it on multiple occasions. In 2011, Harris opposed a bill that would have reformed the procedure.

Presidential campaign

Biden/Harris is more of a Warhawk than Trump is, and their foreign policies alone will lead to more deaths than Trump. Biden wants war with China and Russia and vocally wants to invade Venezuela. He also wants to continue the genocide in the Congo. Biden helped destroy Libya, which resulted in countless deaths and the open-air slave trade. Harris has yet to put forward any substantial foreign policies.

I mentioned how the Democratic ticket is still in favor of mass incarceration. They are not interested in defunding the police, in the midst of everything that's going on. Instead, Biden/Harris would like to give the police $390 million. His campaign has said it is calling for police departments to receive funding that would allow them to provide better training, equip officers with body cameras and improve relationships with the communities they patrol. That would be great if it were 2011, and we hadn't witnessed how useless these proposals.

Harris couldn't get her story straight on her play for healthcare. During a presidential debate, Harris said that she supports the total elimination of the private healthcare insurance industry, which is great. That way, we could have a government-run program, and everyone would be covered in the event of a pandemic where 160,000 people would die. Not even 24 hours later, Harris walked back from those comments and said she did not support abolishing the private insurance sector. This was not the first time Harris and her camp has caused confusion on this topic. The same situation came up in January of 2019 when Harris publicly said she supported M4A on TV, and the next morning her camp stated that's not the case.

Harris has a strong history of saying one thing, even though her actions say she supports something else, and that seems to be the only thing consistent about Harris. She attacked Biden on segregation and race issues, only to later said she and Biden have the same political ideas. The truth is, Harris has struggled to explain her policy stances. Outside of charisma, she's been touted as the "female Obama" in the past; it's tough to point your finger on something positive Harris brings to the table that's not the bare minimum.

In the end, Harris tried to appeal to everyone, and that ended up appealing to nobody. She seemed ashamed of her record as a DA and AG, and rightfully so. She mostly hid from her history of harshness. Even when she called out Biden for the busing incident, she clarified that she didn't favor federally mandated busing. You name it, and Harris has flopped on an issue.

Like Biden, Harris has proved to be a fraud that is not only corrupt but is not in the interest of helping the people that they claim to, the working class. Are they better than Trump/Pence? The question you should ask is, who isn't? A year from now, police brutality won't change, and we're more likely to be still fighting the same systematic and economic issues today.

You have the right to vote for who you want, but don't delude yourselves to do so. History suggests that both tickets are closer to white supremacists that will continue to harm Black people globally. If you want to spin it to a lesser evil, that's fine, but understand it's also not going to get us anywhere as a country. After we had to witness the horrible murder of Breonna Taylor, which led to many propping up the Black woman in hopes to hear her voice, we're now "happy" with one who has a prominent history of racism as she's going to be side by side with a known creep, white supremacist, pedophile, and serial rapist. But, as long as it's not Trump, right?

Look where our country is and how we are still treating protesters and Black people to this day. Representation isn't going to change that. Identity didn't save us during Obama, and it won't save us now. We can do better. We must if we truly want the change we seek.