Kamala Harris speaks frequently about her late mother, biomedical scientist Shyamala Gopalan Harris, but makes few comments about her father, even though Donald Harris, 86, lives just two miles from his daughter’s official residence in Washington. , with his second wife. Thus, the American press has reported on the delicate and tense relationship between the vice president and her father, who is a renowned economist.
It was at the Democratic convention last August that the party’s presidential candidate made an unusual reference to her father in her speech. Her idea was to give an account of how he had influenced her to become the person she is. Harris recalled that when she was little he motivated her in a park: “Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. “Don’t let anything stop you,” he told her.
However, even though they live very close in Washington, they rarely speak and Donald Harris has been largely absent from Kamala Harris’s life, a situation that, according to her friends, has been influenced by both personality traits and family history. Friends of the Harris family suggest that the rift may be due in part to similarities between father and daughter: Both are known for their ambition, high expectations and penchant for maintaining privacy. These shared traits, combined with personal and ideological differences, have contributed to the growing distance between them, The Telegraph newspaper reported.
Their relationship was strained from the beginning, following Donald and Shyamala’s separation and divorce in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Kamala was just five years old when her parents separated, and the subsequent divorce was marked by bitter custody battle. Donald lost the custody case, an event he later described as a traumatic turning point in his relationship with his daughters, Kamala and his younger sister, Maya.
Although he has expressed his love for his children, the legal outcome severely limited his involvement in the lives of the vice president and her sister, and the bond between father and daughter was never fully repaired, the American press indicates. Kamala’s unwavering devotion to her mother, who raised her and her sister as a single parent, appears to have further contributed to the breakup.
Harris frequently praises the strength and courage her mother showed in raising her and her sister alone. And he often credits her with instilling his fighting spirit in him, through bits of wisdom he regularly uses in speeches and public conversations.
In her August convention speech, Harris invoked her mother to emphasize that she was no stranger to “improbable journeys”: She was born to a woman who traveled to California from India alone at the age of 19, with an “unshakeable dream.” to be the scientist who would cure breast cancer.”
“I miss her every day, especially now,” Harris said in her convention speech. “And I know she looks at me with a smile. I know”.
In his 2019 memoirs, The Truths We Holdonly references his father a few times. “But by presenting herself as a candidate who understands the American dream through the complex lenses of personal, family and social struggles, Harris drew on the totality of the experiences that shaped her,” commented The New York Times.
That included when her parents divorced—or, as she would write in her memoirs, “stopped being nice to each other”—when she was in elementary school.
“My father remained a part of our lives,” Harris wrote. “We saw him on weekends and spent summers with him in Palo Alto. But it was my mother who took charge of our education. “She was primarily responsible for making us the women we would become.”
Donald’s absence from important events in Kamala’s life, such as her mother’s funeral and her own wedding, deepened the division, the New York newspaper said.
Five years later, Donald Harris turned down an invitation to attend his daughter’s wedding to Doug Emhoff in a small ceremony in Santa Barbara, California. But after Kamala was elected to the Senate in 2016, the three met in Washington for dinner, where Harris grilled her son-in-law about his background, according to two people familiar with the meeting.
“A lot of the difficulty between them,” Gladstone Hutchinson, a Jamaican-American economist who is a close friend of Dr. Harris, told the newspaper, “is that they are very similar.”
Hutchinson did not know when the two had last spoken, and the vice president, through a spokeswoman consulted by the newspaper, declined to address the issue.
Every time she is asked in various interviews, Kamala Harris avoids providing details or further information when asked about her father. For example, in a 2003 interview with SF Weekly, he said, “My dad is a good guy, but we’re not very close.”
In 2021, Harris wrote in an email to the Washington Post that they were on “good terms,” which remains true today, people close to Harris told the newspaper.
However, Harris has been clear in stating that she is her mother’s daughter. “There is no title or honor on earth that I treasure more than to say that I am the daughter of Shyamala Gopalan Harris,” Harris wrote in her book. “That is the truth I appreciate most.”
Although Kamala practically does not mention anything about her father, Republican candidate Donald Trump often refers to the subject. He even said that the Democrat was a Marxist who had been influenced precisely by Donald Harris. “She’s a Marxist, everyone knows she’s a Marxist,” Trump said during the presidential debate. “His father is a Marxist professor of economics and taught him well.”
The Trump campaign has sought to portray Harris as someone to the left of Joe Biden since she became the Democratic candidate. He even claimed that his plans to address what he described as “price gouging” by large corporations were communist, calling the vice president “Comrade Kamala.” In this sense, Harris has insisted that he supports a free market capitalist economy.
Professor Harris was the first black academic to receive tenure at Stanford University, one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the United States. This appointment in the mid-1970s was controversial: the student newspaper described him as a “Marxist scholar.” Their views were very different from those of “neoclassical” economics, which supported free markets and held that supply and demand dictated production and prices.
Critics of the time said he was “too charismatic” and accused him of being a “Pied Piper” who steered students away from free-market economics.
He also questioned the orthodoxy that reducing wages would increase employment.
Born in Jamaica, he came to the United States in the 1960s to study economics, completing his doctorate at the University of California-Berkeley. His first teaching positions were at the University of Illinois and then Northwestern University, before landing another position at Wisconsin.
Kamala’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, met Donald Harris after a speech he gave at an off-campus venue at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962.
Harris, of course, has recognized his father’s influence on his Jamaican roots and his musical tastes. In fact, Donald Harris was the one who took Kamala, 13, and her sister to their first concert, which was Bob Marley and the Wailers at a stadium at the University of California, Berkeley. “We sat in the back of the theater, and as I watched the performance, I was completely amazed,” Harris said in an email to The Washington Post.
“My father, like so many Jamaicans, is very proud of our Jamaican heritage and he instilled that same pride in my sister and me,” Kamala wrote. “We love Jamaica. “It taught us the history of where we come from, the struggles and beauty of the Jamaican people and the richness of the culture,” he said.