'You don’t meet one line of division with another line of division,' the vice president-elect says.
Kamala Harris is speaking out about hatred in America. The vice president-elect covers the February issue of Vogue and, in an accompanying interview that was conducted prior to the riots at the Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, shares her thoughts on how most Americans feel about hatred.
"At the risk of oversimplifying it, you don’t meet hate with hate. You don’t meet one line of division with another line of division," she says. "We believe that the vast majority of American people don’t agree with that approach, don’t accept it, and don’t like it."
"... We can agree that we have more in common than what separates us," Harris adds. "And agree that it’s not in the best interest of who we are as a nation to have any one group suffer for who they are."
Harris and President-elect Joe Biden were projected as the winners of the election in November, days after Americans cast their votes. Harris discovered the news when she was turning on the shower after a walk with her husband, Doug Emhoff.
"Then I looked at my phone, and the texts came that they had called the race, and I ran downstairs to find Doug -- never turned off the water," Harris recalls. "Luckily enough there were people in the house. 'Somebody go turn off the water!'"
After the moment of levity and a sweet call to Biden, Harris gave a victory speech that acknowledged the history-making win, which will make her the first female vice president.
"It was very important for me to speak to the moment, and the moment includes understanding that there is a great responsibility that comes with being a first," she says. "I always say this: I may be the first to do many things -- make sure I’m not the last."
"I was thinking of my baby nieces, who will only know one world where a woman is vice president of the United States, a woman of color, a Black woman, a woman with parents who were born outside of the United States," she adds.
Former first lady Michelle Obama celebrated Harris' strength and determination.
"Vice President Harris has already been the 'first' many times in her career. This is a woman who knows what she’s doing," Obama tells Vogue. "It can’t be about trying to please everybody or prove to certain people you’re good enough for the job. And the vice president wouldn’t be where she is today if she let that kind of thing get to her."
Now that Harris and Biden's inauguration is fast approaching, the vice president-elect is focused on the future, namely their first 100 days in office.
"The first line of approach has to be to get control of this pandemic," she says of COVID-19. "... We think about the first 100 days in terms of what we need to do to support mayors and governors and local officials around their distribution and their public-health systems. When we get control of this pandemic, that’s going to be a critical factor in being able to reopen our economy."
As she and Biden navigate the pandemic and the fights for criminal justice reform and racial justice, Harris plans to be "a partner" for the future president.
"He decided that I will be a partner for him," she says. "... [I] will always speak truth, always give him my opinion, which will be based on fact and knowledge and life experience, and do it in a way that allows him, when he makes a decision, to make it with full information about the impact -- and he has asked me to do that."
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