NEW YORK: US President-Elect Joe Biden's pick to be associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta, has recalled her experience of racial bigotry as a four-year-old while she pledged her commitment to civil rights and justice reform.
Speaking on Thursday after Biden introduced her as "one of the most respected civil rights lawyers in America", Gupta spoke of her parents as "proud immigrants from India", and the family's experience of bias, "an early memory but one that is seared in my mind".
"One day, I was sitting in a McDonald's restaurant with my sister, mother, and grandmother. As we ate our meals, a group of skinheads at the next table began shouting ethnic slurs and throwing food at us until we had to leave the restaurant," she said.
"That feeling never left me of what it means to be made to feel unsafe because of who you are," said Gupta, who went on to a brilliant career as a fighter for civil rights. She came to national attention when as a newly-minted lawyer she won the release of 38 people, most of them African-Americans, who had been wrongly convicted by all-White juries on drug charges in a Texas town and also got them $6 million on compensation.
She was then working for the Legal Defence Fund of NAACP (National Association of Coloured People) and went on to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Justice Department protecting the rights of immigrants and the underprivileged.
Gupta now heads the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 200 human rights organisations.
But alongside the experience of bigotry, Gupta said she also learnt the lesson of the promise of the promise of America. "I kept another feeling with me, though, too one ingrained in me by my parents and shared by my husband (Chinh Q. Le), whose family fled violence and war in Vietnam and sought refuge on these shores," she said.
"They believed more than anything in the promise of America and that loving this country brings with it the obligation to do the necessary work to make it better."
When she takes up her new job at the Justice Department, Gupta said: "Those two feelings converge in the work ahead of us." Gupta, who had served as the principal deputy assistant attorney general and head of the Civil Rights Division in former President Barack Obama's administration returns to the Justice Department, she will have to be confirmed by the Senate in her new post, which should be easy because the Democratic Party controls it. (IANS)
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