Meena Harris, Kamala Harris and Maya Harris.Photo: Meena Harris/Twitter
By July 2020, Meena Harris was “fed up” with people criticizing the women in her family — including her aunt, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris — for being “too ambitious.”
“It really stopped me in my tracks because I was a parent and feeling fed up,” Meena, 36, tells PEOPLE, referencing the CNBC report that some of President-elect Joe Biden’s allies thought the former California senator was"too ambitious" to serve as his vice president. “Are we really still doing this? Are you going to do this to my daughters and tell them, ‘You’re too ambitious’?”
In response, Meena wrote a children’s book,Ambitious Girl, out Tuesday, which follows a young girl who learns about the challenges women continue to face, the words that are used to knock them down (i.e. “too bossy” and “too strong”) and how best to overcome and reclaim them.
Little, Brown Young Readers
Meena also learned that lesson. She tells PEOPLE that watching her own mother’s journey as a young, single mom inspired her to push for excellence and face challenges head-on. (Maya Harris had Meena when she was a teenager. With a young daughter in tow, Maya became a lawyer after graduating from Stanford Law School.)
The author.Little, Brown Young Readers
“One of my family members says, ‘I eat ‘no’ for breakfast,'” the mother of two explains. “People are going to tell you no. People are going to tell you that something is impossible. If we listen to them, that becomes true. It’s sort of a self-fulfilling thing where they can then further point to, ‘See, we never had a female Vice President, that can’t be done. Our country is not ready for that.'”
Meena continues: “If you are not ambitious, if you do not believe in something bigger than what has been or what we’re able to see, then not only is that not claiming your ambition, it perpetuates these systems that allow people to hold us back.”
The activist’s platform has become even bigger since her aunt became the Vice President-elect, but Meena says their relationship remains “unchanged.”
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With Phenomenal Woman, Meena wants to continue to “amplify” the work of activists, who “have been doing this work day in and day out for decades.” But her biggest hope is that “people stay loud” and continue to fight for change — during the 2020 election and beyond.
“We’re still in the thick of this pandemic and we’ve [heard of] this idea of ‘going back to normal.’ Normal was not working for a lot of people,” she says. “We need to support our people in terms of providing a social safety net. Or, when we talk about ambitious women, supporting them in the workplace so that they can be ambitious and succeed and do all the things they do, such as be caretakers for their family.”
“When we have these elections, it’s really the beginning of that work. There’s a lot of mess that we need to dig ourselves out of,” Meena explains. “But most of all, it’s a real opportunity to see beyond that and to take this as an opportunity for an entirely new framework and era of politics and political engagement — especially from the perspective of underrepresented communities that, frankly, are responsible for winning a lot of these elections and deserve to be heard.”
source: people.com
