She’s a left-wing radical. She’s a pragmatist, a technocrat, an old-school, tough-on-crime liberal. She’s a trailblazer, a ground-breaker. She’s a sell-out, she’s a cop. She’s not black enough. Perhaps pundits struggle to compute a part-Indian, part-Jamaican American woman in public roles they’ve only ever seen filled by white men. Perhaps, too, Kamala Harris defies easy definition because she resists it.

The California senator and Vice-President-elect often tells reporters she wasn’t raised to talk about herself. She can be evasive in interviews and is dismissive when journalists attempt to label her ideologically or place her on the political spectrum – that’s “a nice subject for a graduate class,” she once told a Bloomberg reporter, “but it’s not how people are living life”. Harris says her mother taught her to reject “false choices”, and that she’s grown accustomed to forging her own path. Harris was the first woman of colour on any major party presidential ticket in the US; she’s been the first woman and the first black person in almost any job she’s done.

New Statesman