The Truths We Hold: An American Journey

By Kamala Harris

Penguin Random House/2019

Reviewed by Graham Fraser

September 11, 2024

For Canadians who have not yet read Kamala Harris’s 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, and, after watching her evisceration of Donald Trump in their campaign debate are now contemplating picking it up, be warned: Canada does not play a starring role. Montreal is neither Hawaii nor Hope in this backstory, and there are very pragmatic reasons for that.

Indeed, in Harris’s speech to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention — and the American public — last month, there was a loving description of her early childhood and a detailed account of her work as a prosecutor. I couldn’t help noticing that she skipped over the years she spent in Montreal as a teenager, while her mother was a medical researcher at McGill University and the Jewish General Hospital. There, after starting in French school, she finished high school at Westmount High and did a year at Vanier College before moving to Washington to attend Howard University, the highest-ranked and most iconic of America’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

In The Truths We Hold Harris similarly dwells on her childhood in Berkeley, California, where she was bused to one of the first integrated schools, but skips over her high school years in “a French-speaking foreign city covered in twelve feet of snow” in a page and a half.

While Canadians may feel snubbed by the downplaying of Harris’s time in Montreal, you don’t have to look far for the political cautionary tale that justifies it. For the biographical sin of a childhood stint in Indonesia, Barack Obama endured years of conspiracy theory-fuelled “birtherism” fronted by Donald Trump. And while Montreal may not be quite as exotic as Jakarta, the racism that repurposes any biographical detail through the lens of “otherness” is rarely swayed by fact.

What is intriguing is to see how some of the policies that Harris has supported or advocated for in this book that have been denounced as radically left-wing — gay marriage, affordable childcare, legalization of marijuana, universal health care — are taken for granted in Canada and are unlikely to be reversed, even by a Poilievre government.

The bulk of the book explores her policy paradox — being a progressive prosecutor.  But what emerges is the picture of a cautious, details-driven advocate, determined to demonstrate that she has mastered her files. As a result, she was able to get $20 billion from the banks for California homeowners who had lost their homes after the 2008 financial crisis after an initial offer of $2 billion. (In her debate with Donald Trump, it was clear that among the files she had mastered were Trump’s transgressions as well as his exploitable personality traits).

While Canadians may feel snubbed by the downplaying of Harris’s time in Montreal, you don’t have to look far for the political cautionary tale that justifies it. For the biographical sin of a childhood stint in Indonesia, Barack Obama endured years of conspiracy theory-fuelled ‘birtherism’ fronted by Donald Trump.

After various aphorisms through the book, including, “There is no problem too small to fix,” and her mother’s comment “Focus on what’s in front of you and the rest will follow,” she saves her most interesting chapter for the end: “What I’ve Learned.” She lays out eight lessons:

Test the hypothesis: Harris describes how her mother, like all good researchers, insisted upon using a hypothesis as a starting point for further investigation, and the public policy failures that occur when this doesn’t happen. “The problem is, when you roll out any innovation, new policy or plan for the first time, there are likely to be glitches, and because you’re in the public eye, those glitches are likely to end up on the front page in bold lettering.” She points to and argues for small-scale test cases for new social programs.

Go to the scene: For Harris, as a prosecutor and as a senator, it was crucial to visit the site of the problem, whether it was a poisonously polluted community in California, the war in Iraq, or Syrian refugees in Jordan.

Embrace the mundane: Harris describes how Bill Gates became obsessed with fertilizer as a key to increasing crop outputs and addressing hunger. “Politics is a realm where the grand pronouncement often takes the place of the painstaking and detail-oriented work of getting meaningful things done,” she writes. She acknowledges that good leadership requires vision and aspiration. “But it is often the mastery of the seemingly unimportant details, the careful execution of the tedious tasks, and the dedicated work done outside of the public eye that makes the changes we seek possible. Embracing the mundane also means making sure that our solutions actually work for the people who need them.”

Words matter: She is very aware that what things are called and how they are defined shapes how people think about them. So, as California attorney general, she banned the use of the term “revenge porn” by her staff, saying that the posting of sexually explicit content was not revenge, nor was it pornography; “it was internet-based extortion, plain and simple, so we referred to it as cyber exploitation.”

Show the math: Using the analogy of the requirement to show how an answer was reached to solve a mathematical problem, she argues that it is essential to break down the elements of a case, explain the logic of arguments and show how a conclusion was reached.

No-one should have to fight alone: Martin Luther King reached out to César Chávez in his mobilization of farmworkers, an example that Harris cites in saying that all decent people should stand with Black Lives Matter, and that men must join the #MeToo movement.

If it’s worth fighting for, it’s a fight worth having: The fight she describes is the challenge to the appointment to the United States Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh, whose hostility to civil rights, voting rights and reproductive rights had been known before Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her accusation of sexual assault. The campaign in opposition to his appointment was ultimately unsuccessful, but Harris is optimistic. “We will draw wisdom from every chapter, even when the lessons are hard,” she writes. “We will face what is to come with conviction that change is possible — knowing that truth is like the sun. It always rises.”

You may be the first. Don’t be the last: Harris concludes with a message to what she calls the Role Models Club. When pioneers — women, people of colour, minorities — succeed, they need to bring others along, to go out of their way to lift them up.

Kamala Harris’ story is one of constant activism. It will be fascinating to see if the sharp edges and hard truths in this book have been sanded, rounded and softened by the five years that followed and the campaign she has now embarked upon. Harris’s debate with Donald Trump suggests that, while some of her policies may have been softened, her edge has not been blunted.

Graham Fraser is the former Commissioner of Official Languages, serving from 2006-16. A former Ottawa bureau chief of The Globe and Mail, he also served as the paper’s Washington bureau chief. He is the author of several national bestsellers, including PQ: René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois in Power, and Sorry, I Don’t Speak French: Confronting the Canadian Crisis that Won’t Go Away.