‘Finally the Country Sees Us’: Some Women of Color Cheer Harris’s Rise

“You don’t get to enter those halls without compromise,” Ms. Sanchez said. “There’s always this line between ‘I am going to tell you the truth but in a way you can hear’ versus an activist standpoint. There is no way she is the vice president candidate without having made trade-offs.”

Many women also said they wanted to hear Ms. Harris speak candidly about her own experiences with race and racism. She has, at times, appeared to shy away from talking about what she eventually called the “donkey in the room,” the mostly whispered notion among Democratic voters that the country would not be willing to elect a woman who is both Black and Asian-American to the White House. But much has changed: During this week’s nationally televised convention, two other Black female politicians referred to her as “sister.”

Still, many women recognize how difficult it is to speak about personal experiences.

“We’re expected to be perfect but not too perfect,” said Kacey Bonner, a 42-year-old communications consultant in Los Angeles whose parents grew up in the segregated South. “We’re expected to stay in the box that others think we should be in, and anytime we stray from that we’re punished. You can say lots of things about Senator Harris, but she has refused to be in others’ boxes. And now we’re seeing both the benefits and cost of that.”

In the final weeks of his search for a running mate, some of Mr. Biden’s advisers warned him that Ms. Harris was too “ambitious.” Ms. Harris quickly took a term that was wielded as criticism and embraced it, encouraging young women of color to do the same.

“There will be a resistance to your ambition, there will be people who say to you, ‘You are out of your lane,’” Ms. Harris said during a livestream conversation for the Black Girls Lead conference. “They are burdened by only having the capacity to see what has always been instead of what can be. But don’t you let that burden you.”

As demonstrations against systemic racism and police brutality continue, Ms. François, 31, said she hoped that Ms. Harris would acknowledge the impact of her prosecutorial record and pledge reforms to the criminal justice system in her speech on Wednesday.