Vice President Kamala Harris recently spoke at the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies 2024 legislative leadership summit on Monday. During the speech she got the crowd hyped up by dropping the f-bomb while urging attendees to break barriers via Mediaite.
“So here’s the thing about breaking barriers. Breaking barriers does not mean you start on one side of the barrier and you end up on the other side. There’s breaking involved, and when you break things, you get cut and you may bleed. And it is worth it every time. Every time,” Harris began, adding:
And so too, especially the young people here. I say to you, when you walk in those rooms, being the only one that looks like you, the only one with your background. You walk in those rooms, chin up, shoulders back. Be it a meeting room, a boardroom, a courtroom, a hearing room. You walk in those rooms knowing that we are all in that room with you, applauding you on and expecting certain things from you, including that you will not be silent in those rooms. And that we expect that from you, because we also expect that you will internalize and know we’re there with you. And so your voice can be strong. It is, as Alicia said, my mother would say to me, don’t you ever let anybody tell you who you are? You tell them who you are.
Don’t ever carry as a personal burden, your capacity to do whatever you dream and aspire to do, based on other people’s limited ability to see who can do what. This is part of what’s involved, is that we have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open. Sometimes they won’t and then you need to kick that fu**ing door down. Excuse my language.
Following a lengthy applause, the moderator replied to Harris, “We gonna make t-shirts with that saying, ‘Kick the fu**ing door down.”
