The hard part for Kamala Harris will come after she makes history

When Kamala Harris takes the oath of office Wednesday she will be carrying the hopes, dreams, fears, stereotypes and expectations of every woman of color that has ever imagined a job in politics.

After laying her hand on the Bibles of the first Black Supreme Court justice and Regina Shelton, a “second mother to her,” Harris will confront a pressure that the white men she’s joining in the exclusive vice presidential club never felt. With that comes a mission—as Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, puts it—to “make sure you’re not the last.” It’s the barrier that no other woman or person of color was ever able to clear.

“Starting Wednesday, we're going to be lifted up and we're going to be able to tell our story,” said Donna Brazile, the former DNC chair and a groundbreaking woman of color herself. “And for Black women, we're often invisible. People don't see us. They don't know who we are. They don't know the value that we bring to the public space. And I think this is a great opportunity.”

Making the burden all the more difficult is the disarray that Harris and President-elect Joe Biden will inherit: A pandemic that has killed more than 400,000 people in the U.S., a recession that has ravaged the economy, and a guttural scream for racial justice by Black Americans that has exposed the country to systemic racism in a new and more visceral way.

Aides insist Harris is Biden’s ultimate right hand: in every meeting, a part of every decision. They liken it to Biden’s own role under Barack Obama. So far, that bears out. Biden aides are acutely aware of the historic nature of Harris’ rise — and its broader meaning to millions of Americans. They’ve made sure to incorporate prominent speaking roles for her, such as on the night they officially clinched the White House.

They’ve also made sure to make her one of the most visible veep-elects during a presidential transition. Harris is there, at press conferences, announcing Cabinet picks, and in TV interviews too. But that also means Biden’s successes and, most importantly his failures, will be hers as well. It’s true for every vice-president. But there’s never been this type of VP before. And for Black women, the expectation is that because Harris is a woman of color, the inevitable blowback will be harsher and more layered with racism and misogyny. It’s a reality that women of color have always had to deal with in this country, one perfectly encapsulated in a saying in the Black community: “you have to work twice as hard to get half as much.”

“When you are the first, the blows are sharper... When you are the first, when you are cracking the glass ceiling, it’s your scalp [that] ends up with the shards. It comes with the pain of the effort to get there and the expectation of those who are waiting behind you,” said Kim Foxx, the Cook County State’s Attorney, who considers Harris a role model and mentor. “And I think if you really are committed to not being the last, you realize that every aspect of what you're doing is going to be scrutinized, not just as it reflects on you and your personal effort, but really magnified to the communities that you represent.”

Brazile, the first Black woman to run a major presidential campaign, said that Harris will, for the first time, show millions of Americans, not just how she leads but how women of color across all industries can lead. The country, she added, will have to adjust to the fact that it’s supposed to look different.

“We're less confrontational, for example, but yet we can execute and give directives. We're more collaborative and yet we understand the value of compromise and competition,” said Brazile, whose close-knit circle of trailblazing political operatives includes Tina Flournoy, Harris’ incoming chief of staff in the White House.

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Harris is approaching her opportunity with care and deliberation. As the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, she’ll be a woman of color presiding over a chamber that, with her departure from it, no longer has any Black women serving. She’s hired several Black women at top ranks of her staff, and aides and allies believe one of the unsaid tasks before them is normalizing something Americans haven’t seen before: A world where the White House is a place for Black women.

It’s something Harris has tried to do herself at every rung of the ladder she’s climbed. In San Francisco, as a career line prosecutor from the grittier East Bay, she navigated a largely white political establishment—and it’s deep-pocketed boosters—when she beat out an older white man to become district attorney.

Winning statewide proved even tougher, in part because Harris, as a groundbreaking Black woman in her field, had no blueprint to follow. A top Harris aide recalled being on a flight with one of California’s top elected officials when the topic of Harris’ planned 2010 run for state Attorney General came up.

“You know I love Kamala,” the Democratic official, also a person of color, said at the time, describing how opponents would paint her as a liberal Black woman from wacky San Francisco. “But she can’t win.”

She did win. But during that bid and future runs, she resisted campaigning as a “first'' even while the “donkey”—get it, Democrat?—“in the room,” as she would later put it, was always present.

Ahead of a transition meeting with then-outgoing California Attorney General Jerry Brown’s top staff, aides recalled, Harris stopped in a hallway to review the portraits of the state’s prior top cops—a long line of white men. Harris didn’t say anything, but she raised an eyebrow, giving what another adviser described as her famous “KDH smirk,” using Harris’ initials.

Harris’ AG campaign had previously considered using imagery of all the white men in TV ads, but decided against it. “She didn’t like running on ‘firsts,’” said Brian Brokaw, her campaign manager at the time.

Indeed, along the way, Harris developed snappy but not-so-revealing answers to deploy to voters and the news media when they asked her about the meaning of being “the first.”

“I haven't thought about it,” Harris would say, “but now that you mention it, I’m sure a man could do the job just as well.” Or, when Harris was asked specifically about women’s issues, she might say, “I’m so glad you want to talk about the economy,” before launching into a long list of other major issues that she stressed were just as important to women, and women of color, as they were to the men who’d occupied the office.

They were clever rejoinders. But, sometimes, her answers helped feed broader critiques that she was too cautious or just unwilling to lean into the history she was trying to make.

It wasn’t until Harris ran for president that she began confronting the question about her identity more forcefully. Her campaign launch included an ode to Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman in Congress and the first from a major party to run for president. And she spoke more about what her White House run meant to millions of Americans, particularly Black girls. When she clashed with Biden on the debate stage in Miami over busing for school desegregation, she ended with the now-famous line: “That little girl was me.”

Yet, as the campaign wore on, voters in focus groups were telling her campaign that, while they liked Harris, many doubted that a Black woman could win. Internal polls similarly showed a gap between how voters personally felt about Harris and how they thought she would be perceived by their neighbors—a classic technique politicians use to measure actual public sentiment.

In response, at stops over the fall of 2019, Harris began to articulate, once more, what she viewed as “the donkey in the room.” Ahead of the caucus in Iowa, she reminded audiences that they’d helped launch Obama’s successful candidacy in ‘08 and that they’d voted for Hillary Clinton in the caucus eight years later. Harris begged them to take the leap with her.

“If we have faith to see what can be—unburdened by what has been—we move mountains,” Harris told the congregation at Corinthian Baptist Church in Des Moines one fall day in 2019.

It didn’t work. Harris dropped out before voting started. But in speeches and interviews over the winter and fall of this year, she started reflecting more fully on the meaning of being a “first.”

The words were about her, but also the culture as a whole.

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It’s no secret that Harris will run for president again. Just when is the question.

Biden, who is 78, hasn’t said if he’ll seek a second term in 2024. The next four years will test whether Harris’ history of being the “first” has an unbreakable ceiling. That balance of being cautious, or overly deferential, but also defining and asserting herself as the heir apparent of the Democratic Party, is the task she’ll have to face.

And she’ll have to do it without being seen as overshadowing her boss. This isn’t a novel task for No. 2s, but it is particularly pronounced in this case. For months during the election, Republicans attacked Harris as a liberal “shadow president.” Even some Biden allies ahead of her selection as VP worried that she was “too ambitious.” Navigating this will come with the added layer of being a woman of color.

“So many women of color, particularly Black women, struggle with that thing. And so we mute ourselves. We shrink ourselves. And I think we have finally said goodbye to that era of worrying if we're going to outshine our counterparts if ever there was a time to leave that in the past, it is this moment right now,” said Tiffany Cross, an MSNBC host who has gotten to know Harris and appeared on several panels with her.

Harris’ aides have taken pains to stress how she’s focused on the moment at hand and not her political prospects down the line. Valerie Jarrett, longtime friend and senior aide to President Barack Obama says Harris should stay laser focused on the work and not worry about being careful.

“I think the best way to ensure that you reach a higher office is to be exceptional in the office that you hold, and that does not mean being cautious,” Jarrett said. “It means being true to what drove you into public service in the first place. Then that should encourage you to not hold back, but to push. But you have to be strategic.”

Unlike in her past runs, including the crowded presidential primary, Harris isn’t so alone anymore. Now, with the knowledge that Harris’ successes and setbacks will also impact them, an unofficial sorority of Black elected officials, activists, and operatives are eager to protect her legacy and the future of women, specifically Black women, in politics.

“It requires those of us on the outside who support her to push against those attacks. And there's nothing like making not only a woman mad, but a black woman mad,” Alencia Johnson, a senior adviser for the Biden general election campaign.

“We will protect her,” she added, “because of what she represents and how we know society just scrutinizes Black women in ways that they don't do for any other segment of the population. You'll see that in full force.”