"That little girl was me."

When I heard the news that Senator Kamala Harris was presumed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate yesterday, my heart caught in my throat. Not just for the future, but also for the past.

I immediately imagined little Kamala, daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, riding on a bus across the Bay Area. I imagined her looking out the window at the idiosyncratic storefronts of our rag tag town, where locally owned businesses thrive, the Black Panthers were born, and hippies keep things pretty weird. I imagined her hopping down the steps of that bus as it finally pulled up in front of her school. That furrowed brow. Those old soul eyes.

I live here, too, in Kamala’s Bay Area—a place that will break your heart ten times a day and restore you only partly with its natural abundance. Right now, we’re eating peaches for dessert every night, plucked straight off a tree in the back garden and thrown on the grill; it’s close to perfect, and still won’t make you forget that Oakland Unified School District has served 3.9 million meals to kids since sheltering in started on March 16.

Over 50 years after Kamala Harris was part of school integration efforts, my husband and I intentionally send our White daughter to an integrating school here in Oakland. Despite longtime residents’ warnings that it was a “rough” place, their warnings that she might be unsafe, bored, or resent us for “turning her into an experiment,” she is thriving. On the “first day” of first grade on Monday, she hopped down our stairs dressed to impress in a hand-me-down shirt from her most worshipped older cousin, a denim overall skirt, and a headband she’d just scored from her favorite babysitter down the street.

Maya beamed when she saw the kids in her school, spread out in a grid, so many digital windows into so many different worlds. I beamed, too. There is the Eritrean grandfather that I loved waving to on the playground each morning—his smile so warm you can bask in it. There’s that Latinx mom who cracked me up at the last in-person PTA meeting, talking shit about her sweet husband. And there’s Maya’s best friend, a White boy in a tie with no collar and a homemade vest. Maya waves at him, hoping he’ll notice her in the big zooming crowd. Kids send exclamation point-filled chats to their favorite teachers—I miss you!!!!!

This is America—a place I was lucky enough to be born, but more importantly, have chosen to live in again by sending my kid to a public, integrating school. The kind of place that looks like America’s future—majority Black and Brown, with a bit of everyone else—and sounds like America’s future, too—English and Spanish and Arabic, all thrown in together on playgrounds filled with coveted Jordans and flowing hijab and hipster jumpers.

As you no doubt remember, Kamala clashed with her now-running mate during the primary debates last summer over his history of opposing court-ordered busing for school desegregation. She said: “There was a little girl in California who was a part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.”

Later she added: “Had I been in the United States Senate at that time, I would’ve been completely on the other side of the aisle, and let’s be clear about this: had those segregationists their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate.”

Had those segregationists had their way, she would not be—goddess willing—the first Black woman Vice President of the United States of America.

Just as Kamala is not a perfect leader, court-ordered desegregation, or even voluntary desegregation like the kind we’re engaged in, is not a perfect solution. It doesn’t solve everything. In fact, some days it feels like it creates more problems than it solves. White people, particularly those of us who pride ourselves on being progressive, are still sobering up about our own complicity, growing our stamina for conflict and self-examination, learning to—as my co-conspirators at Integrated Schools puts it—”show up, shut up, and stay put.”

Parents, teachers, and educational leaders of color have every reason to be suspicious of our “good intentions.” Some would prefer to send their kids to schools unapologetically structured around afrocentric curricula and Black excellence; Kamala got that pedagogical medicine, too, while at Howard. Sometimes, we need our separate spaces.

But our roots are entangled, for better and worse. “Unless our children begin to learn together,” Thurgood Marshall said, “there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together and understand each other.”

Now, more than ever before, White Americans get that. We’ve taken to the streets in the middle of a pandemic because we knew that George Floyd was someone’s son and Breonna Taylor someone’s daughter. Now let’s take to the polls. Let’s put that little girl with the old soul eyes in the “highest” office in the land, the one in need of such profound redemption.