How San Francisco’s Tight Community Of Female ‘Firsts’ Shaped Kamala Harris

This column is part of HuffPost’s “She the People” series, stories by Black women exploring Kamala Harris’ historic candidacy. To read more, visit our hub.

During the past two weeks, media pundits, journalists, historians and internet wags have been banging on about Vice President Kamala Harris’ unique profile as a presidential candidate, but her most compelling status, in my book, is as a member of a small, singular group of women who are firsts.

I’m talking about the San Francisco Firsts, a list that includes most prominently House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi; San Francisco Mayor London Breed, the first Black woman to hold that position; and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the first woman elected mayor of San Francisco. Now Harris casts an even brighter glow on our shared hometown.

Long a cynosure city, San Francisco has in recent years become something of a punching bag for right-wing Bad Faith actors nationwide, and for billionaire Big Tech moguls who bash the the city and current elected officials for its supposed hyper-liberal policies ― the very same city that provided them with the physical infrastructure and cultural cachet to build and distribute their dubious machines.

For Black women who are San Francisco natives, like me, decidedly unwelcomed in the problematic realm of rich, white techie arrivistes who beset the city beginning in the 2010s, driving up the cost of living and gentrifying formerly affordable neighborhoods, Harris and the other female officials who were firsts in their elected positions have been role models for decades, primarily for their dedication to the public interest.

During the two weeks since President Joe Biden’s announcement that he was handing off his Democratic presidential candidacy to Harris, I’ve toggled between inchoate anxiety and sheer joy at finally being able to envision a Black woman Bay Area native leading the most powerful nation in the world. Though the concept of “representation” has gotten co-opted by global corporate brands and craven politicians nationwide, it also is the case that Harris genuinely will be a transformational figure should she manage to pull off a win in November, especially given the high stakes at hand for marginalized people coast-to-coast.

Equally important is the fact that Harris represents a point of pride and validation in what I and many of my Black women contemporaries experienced as San Francisco’s most potent secret weapon: A mid-20th century civic environment that genuinely practiced and fostered egalitarianism, however imperfectly.

First Among A Badass Group Of Firsts

I’m a native San Franciscan, born one year before Harris was born in nearby Oakland. I have closely observed, reported on and written about her over many years, including a Q&A in 2009.

To my cohort of middle- and working-class Black San Francisco natives who came of age there during the late 1980s — when cocaine flooded California and the state’s Republican elected leaders ramped up draconian “three strikes” sentencing guidelines and gleefully tagged thousands of low-level, corner-boy dope slingers as “gang members” in order to hit them with “enhanced sentencing” rules that sent them to the pen for decades for nonviolent crimes — Harris’ compassionate, pragmatic reset of the district attorney’s office was welcomed.

Now, weeks after Biden endorsed Harris, we cautiously dream about a genuinely “beloved community.” The prospect of Harris as president inspires real hope that her measured approach to criminal justice will translate into the national incarceration framework, where now millions of Black, Latino and poor people still languish in jails and prisons while also struggling with mental health issues that shamefully have been allowed to escalate unimpeded over decades.

As district attorney of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011, her sentencing rates and overall track record drew praise and criticism from across the spectrum, but to me, that is par for the course in a parochial town that historically has been politically liberal but also moderate bordering on conservative when it comes to elected leadership roles, particularly, the DA’s office prior to Harris’ groundbreaking election in 2003.

To some of us Black women who are San Francisco natives of a certain age, Pelosi, Feinstein, Harris and the other “first women” modeled a disdain for egomaniacal displays and, stylistically, tastefully timeless fashions, strategic deployment of wit, intellect ― and of low-key ruthlessness in professional environments. Harris and Pelosi and the other firsts are courageous and work in service of the greater good, which sounds corny but happens to be how many of us were raised in San Francisco of the 1960s through the onset of the TechPocalypse that ramped up in the mid-2010s.

Even before the dramatic events of the past few weeks, I had been thinking of this tightknit group of San Francisco women in politics, albeit without knowing that Biden would voluntarily drop his reelection bid in July.

SF Made Harris Tough, Strategic, Compassionate

When I was in high school in the Sunset District, I learned that Dianne Feinstein, then a San Francisco supervisor, had tried to stanch the bleeding from Supervisor Harvey Milk’s body after he was shot by an enraged white male former elected official in November 1978 in a City Hall office. Dan White, the gunman, also killed Mayor George Moscone on that November day, a shocking, scary event that is seared into the DNA of many of us who were around at that time. San Francisco City Hall, for me, forever is associated with both my hometown’s tremendous history of economic and cultural might ― and of how political fervor, especially misogyny and racism, can spin into lethal actions.

In my writings about Harris since 2009, I’ve tried to avoid both unduly hyping her political chops and unduly criticizing her technical prosecutorial and political skills. I’ve done this not out of blind fealty to Harris but because I am intimately familiar with the tightrope she has successfully walked in her career and the unfairly disproportionate degree of doubt and outright invective she has received since 2003, when she was first elected DA in San Francisco.

Also, I am deeply familiar with the prejudices and failings of many of those in contemporary American journalism when it comes to covering women, in particular, Black women and especially prominent women of color from San Francisco who attain national profiles.

Which brings me back to the courage of Harris and her fellow firsts from San Francisco’s political scene.

The accurate micro-aspects of Kamala Harris’ California foundation ― specifically, how Black people in my home state are simultaneously celebrated and vilified by institutions ― and her place in a small, powerful group of Democratic women elected in Northern California, are largely unknown to national journalists now swarming her profile. Alas, most national journalists parachuting in to cover any Harris-related story during the past 20 years mostly relied on bad reporting by two decades’ worth of incompetent white San Francisco journalists, which national journalists then superficially refresh, regurgitate, repeat.

But despite how dismally the media might’ve covered her in the past ― and notwithstanding the pernicious rhetoric we all witnessed the other day when the idiotic, racist 45th president spoke at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists ― I am hopeful that the establishment U.S. news business in 2024 can get its act together and deliver culturally competent reporting on Harris and this important moment.

Harris might be a catalyst that breaks the American caste system. As the saying goes, journalists write the first draft of history, and I am sad to report that during my 30-year career as a regional and national journalist, the sector has not only failed to consistently cover the systems and institutions that perniciously oppress vulnerable populations, but also that in its own shop, it practices inequitable decision-making that inhibits the ascension of qualified, dedicated “non-traditional” practitioners.

Still, I truly am cautiously optimistic that now, perhaps, more experienced journalists will make proverbial deeper dives not only into Harris’ professional foundation in San Francisco but also properly contextualizes how the other elected women firsts from our mutual hometown who are her mentors and contemporaries have informed her trajectory and her current status. I’m excited at the possibility that Harris might emerge as the most consequential first among this stellar group of San Francisco’s female firsts.