Activism with an Edge: A Look Back at Kamala Harris’ Memoir

The Truths We Cherish: An American Journey

By Kamala Harris

Penguin Random House/2019

Reviewed by Graham Fraser

September 11, 2024

For Canadians who haven’t read Kamala Harris’ 2019 memoir, The Truths We Cherish: An American Journeyand, after watching her gutting Donald Trump in their campaign debate, are now considering picking it up, be warned: Canada is not a leading figure. Montreal is neither Hawaii nor Hope in this backstory, and for very pragmatic reasons.

Indeed, in Harris’s speech to the Democratic National Convention delegates — and the American public — last month, there was a loving description of her early life and a detailed account of her work as a prosecutor. I couldn’t help but notice that she skipped the years she spent as a teenager in Montreal, while her mother was a medical researcher at McGill University and the Jewish General Hospital. There, after starting at the French school, she finished high school at Westmount High and did a year at Vanier College before moving to Washington to attend Howard University, the most highly regarded and iconic of America’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

In The truths we hold Harris similarly recounts her childhood in Berkeley, California, where she was bused to one of the first integrated schools, but she skips a page and a half into her high school years in “a French-speaking foreign city covered in ten feet of snow.”

While Canadians may feel slighted by the downplaying of Harris’ time in Montreal, one need not look far for the political cautionary tale that justifies it. For the biographical sin of growing up in Indonesia, Barack Obama endured years of conspiracy-theory-fueled “birtherism” under Donald Trump. And while Montreal may not be as exotic as Jakarta, the racism that recycles every biographical detail through the lens of otherness is rarely swayed by facts.

It is intriguing to see how some of the policies Harris supported or advocated in this book that have been labeled as radical left-wing—gay marriage, affordable child care, legalization of marijuana, universal health care—are taken for granted in Canada and unlikely to be rolled back, even by a Poilievre government.

The bulk of the book explores her policy paradox: being a liberal prosecutor. But what emerges is a cautious, detail-oriented attorney determined to show that she has mastered her records. As a result, she was able to extract $20 billion from the banks for California homeowners who lost their homes in the 2008 financial crisis, after an initial offer of $2 billion. (In her debate with Donald Trump, it was clear that among the records she had mastered were Trump’s transgressions and his exploitable personality traits.)

While Canadians may feel slighted by the downplaying of Harris’ time in Montreal, you don’t have to look far for the political cautionary tale that justifies it. For the biographical sin of a childhood sojourn in Indonesia, Barack Obama endured years of “birtherism” fueled by conspiracy theories peddled by Donald Trump.

After several aphorisms in the book, including, “There is no problem too small to solve,” and her mother’s comment, “Focus on what’s in front of you and the rest will follow,” she saves her most interesting chapter for the end: “What I Learned.” She lays out eight lessons:

Test the hypothesis: Harris describes how her mother, like all good researchers, insisted on using a hypothesis as a starting point for further research, and the policy failures that occur when this is not done. “The problem is that when you first roll out an innovation, a new policy, a plan, there are likely to be glitches, and because you’re in the public eye, those glitches are likely to be front-page headlines.” She points to and advocates for small-scale test cases for new social programs.

Go to the crime scene: For Harris, as both a prosecutor and a senator, it was critical to go to the scene of the problem, whether it was a polluted community in California, the war in Iraq or Syrian refugees in Jordan.

Embrace the everyday: Harris describes how Bill Gates became obsessed with fertilizer as the key to increasing crop yields and tackling hunger. “Politics is a domain where the big statement often takes the place of the meticulous, detail-oriented work of getting meaningful things done,” she writes. She acknowledges that good leadership requires vision and aspiration. “But it is often the mastery of the seemingly insignificant details, the careful execution of the boring tasks, and the dedicated work done away from the public eye that makes the changes we seek possible. Embracing the mundane also means ensuring that our solutions actually work for the people who need them.”

Words matter: She is acutely aware that what things are called and how they are defined determines how people think about them. So, as California Attorney General, she banned her staff’s use of the term “revenge porn,” saying that posting sexually explicit content was neither revenge nor pornography; “it was Internet-based extortion, plain and simple, so we called it cyberexploitation.”

Show the math: She uses the analogy of the demand to show how an answer is reached in solving a mathematical problem. She argues that it is essential to break down the elements of a case, explain the logic of arguments, and show how a conclusion is reached.

No one should fight alone: Martin Luther King reached out to César Chávez in his mobilization of farm workers. Harris uses this example when he says that all decent people should support Black Lives Matter and that men should join the #MeToo movement.

If it’s worth fighting for, then it’s a fight worth fighting for: The battle she describes is the challenge to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, whose hostility to civil liberties, voting rights, and reproductive rights was well-known even before Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her sexual assault allegations. The campaign against his nomination was ultimately unsuccessful, but Harris is optimistic. “We will draw wisdom from each chapter, even when the lessons are hard,” she writes. “We will face what comes with the conviction that change is possible—knowing that truth is like the sun. It always rises.”

You may be the first. Don’t be the last: Harris closes with a message to what she calls the Role Models Club. When trailblazers — women, people of color, minorities — succeed, they have to take others with them, go out of their way to lift them up.

Kamala Harris’s story is one of constant activism. It will be fascinating to see whether the rough edges and hard truths in this book have been sanded, rounded, and softened by the five years that have followed and the campaign she has now embarked on. Harris’s debate with Donald Trump suggests that while some of her policies may have softened, their edge has not been dulled.

Graham Fraser is the former Commissioner of Official Languages, serving from 2006 to 2016. He is a former Ottawa bureau chief of The Globe and Mail and also served as the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief. He is the author of several national bestsellers, including PQ: René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois in Power and Sorry, I Don’t Speak French: Confronting the Canadian Crisis that Won’t Go Away.