Kamala Harris’s Ceiling Shattering VP Acceptance Speech Was Feminist AF

Kamala Harris honored black women, the suffragettes, and her mother in a history-making acceptance speech

On November 7, 2020, the country celebrated President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, and on Saturday night after a day of joy and partying, Harris and Biden took to the stage in Delaware to signal the end of the election. While another VP-elect might be expected to focus their victory speech on their running mate, Harris spent her time onstage honoring the women who made this night possible for her. She honored the women who shattered glass ceilings before her, she honored her mother, and she honored all the Black women whose presence in this election fundamentally changed democracy. It was the most feminist election acceptance speech ever.

Harris, now the first woman and first woman of color to be elected Vice President, waltzed onto the stage to the tune of Mary J. Blige’s “Work That” in a suffragette white power suit with a pussy bow. Harris honored “all the women who have worked to secure and protect the right to vote for over a century,” but most importantly, she honored her late-mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris.

“When she came here from India at the age of 19, she maybe didn’t quite imagine this moment,” Harris said. “But she believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible, and so I am thinking about her and about the generations of women, Black women, Asian, white, Latina, Native American women, who throughout our nation’s history, who paved the way to tonight, women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all.”

Harris then turned her focus to Black women, who she said are “too often overlooked but so often prove they are the backbone of our democracy.” Case in point: Black women like Stacey Abrams, who tirelessly worked to get out the vote in Georgia, flipping it blue for Biden and proving that Georgia was never a red state, but a voter-suppressed state and now a battleground state.

Harris thanked our new President-elect Biden for “the audacity to break one of the most substantial barriers that exist in our country and select a woman as his vice president,” and while we applaud Joe Biden, the ally, this historic feat is all Kamala and the women who made this possible for her.

“While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” Harris shared. “Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”