Vice President and selected Democrat nominee Kamala Harris will be accepting the nomination for president at the Democrat National Convention on Thursday. There have been rumors of surprise guests, like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and even former President George W. Bush.
Truth be told, I’d be happy for an appearance by Harris’ father, Stanford Professor Emeritus and economist Donald Harris. With as little mention as he’s received in this campaign, let alone throughout her entire career in California, her 2020 run for president, and as vice president, you would think Kamala’s mother Shyamala Gopalan was the second immaculate conception. But I shouldn’t give Democrats any ideas.
Some of this inquiry about Donald Harris started in 2020, when Kamala Harris mounted her first presidential run. There are biographies about Harris the daughter’s background, and all of them give a scant mention of her father.
She was was born in 1964 in Oakland — the hospital a little over a mile from the city hall where, more than half a century later, she would announce her short-lived 2020 bid for the presidency. Born to immigrant parents who met while getting their PhDs and protesting for civil rights at UC Berkeley, she spent her childhood in Berkeley. Harris’ father, Donald Harris, is from Jamaica and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, is from India. The couple split when Harris was 7, and Harris and her sister Maya were raised mostly by her mother, who died in 2009.
Kamala’s “homegrown team” paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, also wrote a perfunctory paragraph acknowledging Donald Harris as father and former husband.
Her father is Donald Harris, a Jamaican immigrant who is an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was born in India and was a cancer researcher and civil rights activist who last worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Harris’ parents met at UC Berkeley while they were pursuing their Ph.D.s, and divorced when she was 7. Gopalan died in 2009.
However, for a legacy media that has been overly committed of late to the polishing and reinvention of every aspect of Kamala Harris’ history, they continue to steer clear of the paterfamilias. Professor Donald Harris has a long history of scholarship at Stanford University and presently consults on economics. Why has no one asked Harris the daughter about her father and his work? You receive a hint of some relationship from this glossy piece that Donald Harris wrote in 2018 for Jamaica Global Online. The article documents his family heritage, and he discusses the separation from his children after the divorce and how he had little connection with them during their formative years. But Harris the father alludes to a restored relationship, particularly with his granddaughter Meena and his great granddaughters.
This early phase of interaction with my children came to an abrupt halt in 1972 when, after a hard-fought custody battle in the family court of Oakland, California, the context of the relationship was placed within arbitrary limits imposed by a court-ordered divorce settlement based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting (especially in the case of this father, “a neegroe from da eyelans” was the Yankee stereotype, who might just end up eating his children for breakfast!). Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children or reneging on my responsibilities as their father.
So, here we are now [picture of Kamala Harris and her niece, Meena]
All grown up now, Kamala is carving a way for herself in America and Meena is doing the same by her own route (as is her mother Maya). Not to be ignored is little Amara, the first of my two great-granddaughters.
Seven years later, one marriage, and being elected vice president hasn’t even rendered a statement from him about how proud he is of his very accomplished daughter? It’s a bit suspicious, particularly in their drive to paint her as the second coming.
In a 2020 article in Maclean’s, it talked about the backgrounds of both her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, and her father.
Again: “I was born black.” Yet Sen. Harris’s mother, née Shyamala Gopalan, was a Brahmin Hindu born in Chennai (Madras), the oceanside megalolopolis of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu; and her father, raised in Brown’s Town, educated in Port Antonio and at the University of the West Indies, is as Jamaican as the sun and the sea. (Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris died in 2009 at the age of 70.) Just as Barack Hussein Obama is the mixed-race descendent of tribal Kenya and sunflowery Kansas, Kamala Harris, potentially Obama’s successor’s successor, is every bit as not-really-a-real-American as her desperate opponents may choose to make her out to be. Will that matter?
Maclean’s even documents Harris’ appearance on the Breakfast Club, where she claimed she smoked marijuana and joked, “Half my family’s from Jamaica! Are you kidding me?”
Donald Harris was not pleased. If you read the loving and steadfast pride in his heritage from the article mentioned above, you can fully understand what an insult this type of flippant comment is. Donald Harris made his displeasure known on a Jamaica Global Online article, and Maclean’s received permission to reprint it. Although they link the publication, the actual comment has since been scrubbed. Interesting that they chose this piece of information to get rid of.
Donald Harris, 81, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, divorced from Shyamala Gopalan since 1972, offered this comment to the website Jamaica Global Online, whose editor, Ian Randle, shared it exclusively with Maclean’s:
My dear departed grandmothers, as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics. Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty.
In 2023, well into her role as vice president, the publication Inquistr also had questions about the presence (or lack thereof) of Donald Harris. They came to these conclusions.
Is their relationship estranged, or is he entirely absent from his daughter’s life? […]
Despite being the Vice President’s father and a renowned Economist himself, the media couldn’t fully dissect the Democrat’s relationship with the 82-year-old. Steven Fazzari, an Economics professor at Washington University in St. Louis and a doctoral student of Harris’s in the 1980s, said, “It seems pretty clear that he wants to stay out of the limelight.” Fazarri continued, “It’s a bit unusual, but it could be what he wants, and she’s respecting it… He’s the academic’s academic. He’s very thoughtful, very deep in his thinking. Rather abstract and theoretical.” However, Harris frankly said in a 2003 interview, “My father is a good guy,” adding, “but we are not close.”
A Marie Clare article, which has been revised a number of times, also alludes to this strained relationship.
Though her father is featured in some social media pictures shared by the vice president, Kamala doesn’t speak frequently about Donald. Instead, she more often refers to her husband, Doug; her stepchildren, Cole and Ella; her mother Shyamala; and her sister, Maya Harris.
According to a 2019 Washington Post article, friends of the family have noted that Kamala and Donald’s relationship has been “strained” at times.
“At 82, he has little desire for the attention or celebrity that comes with his daughter’s ascent,” reporter Robert Samuels wrote at the time. A New York Times article also noted that in her acceptance speech for the VP nomination, in which she thanked almost her entire family, Donald was not mentioned.
One fully understands wanting to avoid the media spotlight and to steer clear of the circus of politics. But the fact that Donald Harris is never mentioned and hasn’t even made an appearance (even via video) at the DNC is troubling. It’s as offensive as that Molech Mobile outside of the DNC. It’s as if Kamala Harris wants to abort her own father from her history. Single mothers appear to be the ultimate GOOD with the Democrats. Practically every speaker has led with being the product of a single-mother home. Single motherhood is lauded above traditional marriage, and if there are any couples on the stage, it’s couples who wanted abortions or who claim they were barred from IVF. JD Vance’s “cat lady” point is being proven with each and every woman they have trotted out on the DNC stage. But a father who was marginalized from his children’s lives due to divorce? YAWN. Not worthy of Democrat’s focus, and definitely not something the top Democrat nominee wants as part of her story.
This also gives insight into Harris complicated relationship with Black men, from WiIlie Brown, to Montel Williams, to the thousands she capriciously imprisoned when she was San Francisco’s District Attorney and California’s Attorney General. An Economist article probably came closest to hitting the nail on the head. Papa Harris is a proud Marxist economist and his philosophy is a window into Kamala’s own socialist leanings. Donald Harris and Sen. Bernie Sanders would be sympatico on most everything, including being property owners while the rest of the world has to give their fair share.
Here is a snippet from that article that gives insight.
Trying completely to reconcile Mr Harris’s work with the mainstream would bowdlerise it, though, as it is more unashamedly Marxist than anything in modern American politics. He is concerned with exploitation, the value form and the diminishing rate of profit. In one paper he dismissed the idea of America’s black population as analogous to those living under colonial rule, arguing that the problem was capitalism rather than dominance by a foreign power. There is no reason why black workers would be better off under black capitalists than white ones, he wrote.
Today few politicians are keen to cite Robinson or Sraffa as intellectual influences. Mr Harris, for his part, retired from academia in 1998 to focus on policy work, including advising the Jamaican government. For all his earlier radicalism, he has recommended fiscal discipline and crime reduction, as well as export-led growth and industrial strategy. In the end, however, perhaps his greatest economic legacy will be his daughter.
Perhaps that is also part of Kamala Harris’ refusal to acknowledge her father’s influence. What she may despise in her father, she also despises in herself.
Interesting analysis from an African-based news source that bothered to dig deeper than the American legacy media.
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