PARIS — When Vice President Kamala Harris toured an American military cemetery outside Paris this week, she stopped at the grave of a woman from Oakland, California, who had served as a switchboard operator during World War I.
Harris’ guide said such women, known as “Hello Girls,” were adept at working phone lines. His comment prompted a quick clarification from Harris.
“It was one of the few jobs women could have,” said the first female vice president in U.S. history. “Because they could have also been surgeons.”
Harris’ trip to France has afforded her an opportunity to reveal herself on the world stage — highlighting her status as the first woman and the first woman of color to serve in such high office — after 10 months of focusing on responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises that have left her domestic reputation battered.
As she introduces herself to America’s oldest ally, Harris is doing so in personal terms. She has visited a Parisian laboratory where her mother, an Indian-born scientist, conducted medical research, and the gravesite of a fellow barrier-breaker from Oakland, the vice president’s hometown, as part of her Veterans Day remembrance. Her keynote speech at the Paris Peace Forum on Thursday not only included references to her mother, but also to larger themes around growing inequality in the world.
“My mother and her work taught me the power of the short and very important question,” Harris said in her 13-minute speech. “That question being why history is full of leaders — leaders in science and politics and business and the arts and education — leaders who refuse to accept the status quo who asked why, who took action?”
Harris said problems such as viruses, economic inequality, cyberattacks and climate change do not respect borders and can only be fixed with cooperation among countries.
Harris’ two prior foreign trips — to Latin America and Asia — were limited by COVID-19 restrictions and overshadowed by controversies involving Harris’ remarks about the U.S.-Mexico border and the administration’s chaotic pullout from Afghanistan. Harris’ advisers hope the five-day trip to France will give her foreign affairs reputation a reset.
While Harris’ visit here is not garnering the kind of attention a president would receive, she has drawn some interest among the French, who celebrated America’s first Black president, Barack Obama, dating to a 2008 visit when he was still a senator.
She was featured prominently in news accounts after meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday night and shown multiple times on live television Thursday, when she chatted amicably with Macron during the national commemoration of Armistice Day under the Arc de Triomphe.
Alexis Buisson, a French journalist based in New York who is writing a biography of Harris, said people who follow politics, as well as activists who are pushing France to address race more openly, have closely followed Harris’ career.
“Suddenly, you have this political figure like Kamala Harris who comes out of nowhere for the French. ... She’s not an old white man,” Buisson said.
“She represents some kind of new America that, frankly, the French prefer to Trump’s America,” he added.
In addition to Buisson’s biography, there is at least one French documentary on Harris in the works.
Harris has personal ties to France and the French language. She spent her teenage years in Quebec, Canada, including time at a French-speaking school. Though she speaks some French, she has stuck to English in her public appearances here.
During her visit Tuesday to the Institut Pasteur, she talked frequently about her mother, a cancer researcher who worked at the institute decades ago. At least one of the researchers she met with had looked up her mother’s old papers and complimented them for their early insights.
“The breakthroughs that (my mother) was responsible for in the ’80s was the basis for a lot of great work,” Harris said.
Part of the interest in Harris also stems from the particular moment in Europe — when liberals are grappling with right-wing populism and reexamining their countries’ relationship with race and racism.
“More than racism, the fact that (racist language has) become normal and people say it out loud,” said Rebecca Amsellem, who runs a feminist media company in Paris, of the change in tone.
When Americans protested the killing of George Floyd last year, the French followed suit with their own mass movement tied to Adama Traoré, a young Black man who died while in police custody in a Paris suburb.
France‘s population is estimated to be 4% to 5% Black, but the country does not keep official statistics on race, one of many traditions that shows the difference in how race is portrayed and constructed here compared with the United States. The French tradition, born of the Enlightenment, views the notion of citizenship as excluding other identities.
In another sign of affinity with Black Americans, the French next month will bury Josephine Baker in the Pantheon, an 18th-century monument in the center of Paris. Baker, an American-born entertainer who moved to France in the 1930s and died in 1975, became active in the French Resistance and the civil rights movement.
She was one of a group of artists and intellectuals who came to France during the 20th century seeking a haven from racism. She will be the first Black woman to be buried at the Pantheon, a high honor given to only about 80 people, including only five other women. She is currently buried in Monaco.
The event will be a source of pride to many French, though people here remain uncomfortable around the topic of race, and the country’s own history in the slave trade, said Christiane Taubira, the first Black woman to serve as France’s minister of justice.
“Until they are confronted with the question of the issue of color, they don’t think about it,” she said.
That’s why she views the symbolism of Harris’ visit as significant.
“Its very important for white people who have some prejudices,” she said. “It’s very important for them to see, to watch such a lady with this high level of responsibility.”
