Is America ready to elect a Black woman as its president? Vice President Kamala Harris, who will be officially confirmed as the Democratic US presidential nominee in Chicago next week, is betting that it is.

“In my entire career, I’ve heard people say when I ran… people aren’t ready, it’s not your time, nobody like you has done that before,” the Democrat said in 2019 when she ran against Joe Biden in the primary presidential campaign.

“I haven’t listened and I would suggest that nobody should listen to that kind of conversation.”

But Harris’s campaign never took off and she left the primaries race before Biden picked her as his running mate.

If Harris, 59, manages to beat Donald Trump in November, she will become the first woman and the second Black person, after Barack Obama, to run the world’s leading power.