No More Kisses
A vice-president with African-American or Asian roots, such as Kamala Harris, was unthinkable even to people whose job it is to make up stories in Hollywood.
By Piotr Tarczyński
No American politician aspires to the role of vice-president; no one enters politics in the hope of one day living at Number One Observatory Circle rather than in the White House. “Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea; the other was elected vice-president. And nothing was ever heard of either of them again,” Thomas Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s deputy, once said. He was quite right, as evidenced by the fact that the vast majority of you have probably never even heard of Thomas Marshall.
Kamala Harris, who on 20 January 2021 will become the first female vice-president in the history of the United States, stands out from her predecessors not only because of her gender, but also because of her Jamaican-Indian heritage. She is only the third woman ever to be nominated for this position by one of the two major parties. Although Americans have never before had a real female vice-president, popular culture has presented them with enough fictional ones for a certain image of a female vice-president to become firmly established in the collective imagination.
