In August 2020, social media posts about U.S Sen. Kamala Harris made rounds. The posts showed the senator referring to her 18-to-24-year-old potential voters as "stupid". The posts are all over Facebook and Twitter.
What the senator said
On August 11, Harris was selected by former Vice President Joe Biden as his Vice President for the upcoming presidential election. Biden and Harris form the Democratic ticket. Harris is viewed favorably among various voter demographics including the young ones.
However, it is true that Harris made a remark calling people in the 18-24 age range stupid during a speech in 2014 when she was still the attorney general of California, as what is seen in the post on Facebook.
Harris was not directly talking about the voters. There is a missing context from the claim, and it is that Harris recounted various efforts to reduce incarceration and recidivism among young voters, she then commented on the decision-making tendencies of young adults.
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The comment came as she was describing Back on Track, which is a program that she launched in 2005 when she was the district attorney of San Francisco.
The program allowed young people facing first-time, low-level drug sale charges to have their case dismissed if they met the educational and career achievement goals.
Harris did refer to the young voters as stupid back in 2014 as seen on Youtube. But she was not talking about voters in that age range, she was talking about the developmental stage of life for those who are in the age range.
The line was as a tongue-in-cheek jab to show a broader need for empathy when it comes to how bad decisions can lead young people to be prosecuted as adults.
Not the first black female vice president
Right after Joe Biden announced that Sen. Kamala Harris will run alongside him for the presidential election this November 2020, news outlets and social media labeled her as the first black female vice president.
However, she is not the first. Decades before Harris, there was Charlotta Bass. Reported by The Washington Post, Bass was an activist and journalists, she became the first black woman to run for vice president in the United States in 1952, she was under the Progressive Party ticket.
Bass told a crowd in Chicago in her acceptance speech that her running is a historic moment in American political life. She noted that it is historic for herself, for her people, and for all women.
Bass added that "for the first time in the history of this nation a political party has chosen a Negro woman for the second-highest office in the land."
In the early 1900s, Bass moved from Rhode Island to California. She then got a job selling newspapers for The Eagle, which was one of the first Black newspapers in Los Angeles.
According to a history professor at the University of Southern Indiana, Denise Lynn, over time Bass' responsibilities at the paper grew and Joseph Neimore, the editor, asked her to take over upon his death.
For 40 years, Bass was the paper's editor and wrote about education, labor, police brutality, and women's suffrage at a time before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made voting possible for people of color.
Bass was a devoted activist and the first Black woman to own a newspaper. She used the paper to protest the Ku Klux Klan and to support Black nurses' strike.
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