BOOK REVIEW: The Truths We Hold – An American Journey by Kamala Harris

By Jim Heffernan

The Los Angeles called this book, “A life story that genuinely entrances.” They were certainly right about that. This book grabbed me from the beginning and held my attention through the Preface and all 10 chapters. Throughout the book she seems to be on the right side of the issues that bedevil us.

She is the daughter of an Indian woman and a Jamaican man who met and married at UC Berkeley while they were on their way to becoming Ph. D’s. Her book tells of her life as a child, student, prosecuting attorney, District Attorney, Attorney General and Senator. It includes the story of her marriage, but finishes before her term as Vice President.

She uses the Preface of the book to summarize the objectives of her book and she does it better than I can. She fills the following 10 chapters with the details in a way that I found entertaining and enlightening.

Here’s the excerpt from the Preface:

On January 4, 1992, one of my heroes and inspirations, Thurgood Marshall gave a speech that deeply resonates today. “We cannot play ostrich”, he said. “Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage. America must get to work. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust.”

This book grows out of that call to action, and out of my belief that our fight must begin and end with speaking truth.

I believe there is no more important and consequential antidote for these times that a reciprocal relationship of trust. You give and you receive trust. And one of the most important ingredients in a relationship of trust is that we speak truth. It matters what we say. What we mean. The value we place on our words-and what they are worth to others.

We cannot solve our most intractable problems unless we are honest about what they are, unless we are willing to have difficult conversations and accept what facts make plain,

We need to speak truth: that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and anti-Semitism are real in this country, and we need to confront those forces. We need to speak truth: that, with the exception of Native Americans, we all descend from people who weren’t born on our shores whether our ancestors came to America willingly, with hopes of a prosperous future, or forcibly, on a slave ship, or desperately, to escape a harrowing past.

We cannot build an economy that gives dignity and decency to American workers unless we first speak truth; that we are asking people to do more with less money and to live longer with less security. Wages haven’t risen in forty years, even as the costs of health care, tuition, and housing have soared. The middle class is living paycheck to paycheck.

We must speak truth about our mass incarceration crisis-that we put more people in prison than any country on earth, for no good reason. We must speak truth about police brutality, about racial bias, about the killing of unarmed black men. We must speak truth about pharmaceutical companies that pushed addictive opioids on unsuspecting communities, and payday lenders and for-profit colleges that have leeched on to vulnerable Americans and overloaded them with debt. We must speak truth about greedy, predatory corporations that have turned deregulation, financial speculation, and climate denialism into creed. And I intend to do just that.

This book is not meant to be a policy platform, much less a fifty-point plan. Instead, it is a collection of ideas and viewpoints and stories, from my life and from the lives of the many people I’ve met along the way.

Just two more things to mention before we get started:

First, my name is pronounced “comma-la,” like the punctuation mark.

It means “lotus flower,” which is a symbol of significance in Indian culture. A lotus grows underwater, its flower rising above the surface while its roots are planted firmly in the river bottom.

And second, I want you to know how personal this is for me. This is the story of myfamily. It is the story of my childhood. It is the story of the life I have built since then. You’ll meet my family and my friends, my colleagues and my team. I hope you will cherish them as I do and, through my telling, see that nothing I have ever accomplished could have been done on my own. -Kamala 2018