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Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Kamala Harris becoming the first woman vice president in United States history is that it does not feel all that remarkable that a woman should occupy such a position. It is, of course, and Hillary Clinton, who might have been the first woman president had her campaign taken Rust Belt voters’ concerns seriously in the 2016 election cycle, advised on Twitter earlier this week, “Let’s just sit with this for a minute and what it means.”
Vice President Harris (it gives chills just to type those words) is also the first South Asian-American and first Black American and first Caribbean-American to take the post, and her family background could be an important signal about what kind of role she would assume as a national leader. Her mother came to the U.S. as a 19-year-old graduate student from India studying nutrition and endocrinology and went on to a path-blazing career in biology that … [more]