Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has named Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate - the first black woman and Indian-American in the role.

"Once a rival for the top job, the California senator of Indian-Jamaican heritage had long been considered the front-runner for the number two slot.

The former California attorney general has been urging police reform amid nationwide anti-racism protests.

Mr Biden will face President Donald Trump in the election on 3 November.

Ms Harris will debate Mr Trump's running mate, Vice-President Mike Pence, on 7 October in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Only two other women have been nominated as vice-presidential candidates - Sarah Palin by the Republican party in 2008 and Geraldine Ferraro by the Democrats in 1984. Neither made it to the White House.

A woman of colour has never been appointed to a presidential ticket by either of the two main American political parties. No woman has won the US presidency either." Continue reading at BBC.

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When asked about her identity in the past, Ms Harris has stated that she views herself as American first and foremost. 

“I’m no different than anybody else,” she said. “I’m not suggesting that I don’t have the doubts and whatever that any normal person has. But . . . I don’t have any doubts about who I am ethnically or racially.”

Harris has often spoken of her mother, a Tamil from Chennai in southeast India, as her inspiration, and she writes about it extensively in her book.

Gopalan graduated from college in India at 19, then moved to California in 1959 and earned a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. There, she met and married Donald J. Harris, who is now an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University.

After their divorce, Harris visited her father’s family in Jamaica and stayed in touch with him. But she credited her mother, a noted cancer researcher and civil rights activist who died in 2009, with being “most responsible for shaping us into the women we would become.”

On her visits to India as a child, Harris was deeply influenced by her grandfather, a high-ranking government official who had fought for Indian independence. But while she had a “strong awareness and appreciation for Indian culture,” she writes, her mother raised her in an African American world.

“From almost the moment she arrived from India, she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the black community,” Harris writes. “It was the foundation of her new American life.” Continue reading at the Washington Post.

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