Vice President Kamala Harris has ceaselessly cited her upbringing and household as she crisscrosses the nation in an effort to rally help for her newly-formed presidential marketing campaign, together with touting her father in a uncommon point out on the DNC.
“My early memories of our parents together are very joyful ones. A home filled with laughter and music: Aretha, Coltrane and Miles. At the park, my mother would say, ‘Stay close.’ But my father would say, as he smiled, ‘Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.’ From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless,” Harris mentioned throughout her acceptance speech through the DNC in Chicago final Thursday.
Harris was born in Oakland, California, in 1964 to Shyamala Gopalan, a biologist who immigrated to the U.S. from India, and Donald Harris, an economist who immigrated from Jamaica.
Harris’ mother and father divorced when she was 7 years outdated, with the longer term vice chairman spending quite a lot of her time together with her mom and sister in Canada in her youth, the place their mom labored as a researcher on the McGill College Faculty of Drugs.
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Donald Harris holding his daughter Kamala in April 1965. (Kamala Harris marketing campaign, through Related Press)
Following Harris rising to the highest of the Democratic presidential ticket and formally accepting the get together’s nomination final week, Fox Information Digital examined her father’s background and legacy inside academia.
Donald J. Harris, who coincidentally shares the identical first identify as VP Harris’ Republican rival, former President Donald J. Trump, is a retired Stanford College professor of economics, whose econ background is steeped in Marxist concept, which earned him the outline from the Economist final month as a “combative Marxist economist.”
“He is a clear writer. There are few compound nouns or sentences that run for paragraphs. Yet he is still a Marxist and his writings are sprinkled with obscurantist theorising. Republicans who have mocked Ms. Harris for word-salad speeches will find precedent in her father’s writing,” the Economist wrote of Harris’ father.
Donald J. Harris was born in 1938 in Jamaica, and earned his bachelor’s diploma from the College of London earlier than transferring to the U.S. to finish his doctorate in economics on the College of California in Berkeley in 1966. He met the vice chairman’s mom whereas attending Berkeley, with the pair marrying and sharing daughters Kamala and Maya Harris.
He held instructing positions at Northwestern College and the College of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign earlier than the couple divorced within the early Seventies. He took a place with Stanford in 1972 as a professor of economics after additionally working at the College of Wisconsin – Madison.
The Stanford Day by day, the elite college’s scholar newspaper, described Donald Harris as instructing “radical political economics” and as a “Marxian economist” in 1974. He notably grew to become the primary Black scholar to obtain tenure inside Stanford’s financial college.
Kamala Harris has additionally not often talked about her father all through her political profession. (Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Pictures)
He retired from instructing in 1998 “in order to pursue more actively and practically his long-standing interest, which originally motivated him to take up the study of economics, in developing public policies to promote economic growth, unleash productive capabilities, and advance social equity,” based on his Stanford biography. He has since served as an knowledgeable on how you can encourage financial development for his house nation of Jamaica, the Washington Publish beforehand reported.
Harris additionally nonetheless serves as a professor emeritus at Stanford following his retirement.
He has notably remained comparatively quiet about his daughter’s political successes, not becoming a member of her on the DNC or different political rallies and really not often providing perception into his relationship along with his daughter.
Kamala Harris has additionally not often talked about her father all through her political profession, saying in 2003, “My father is a good guy, but we are not close,” earlier than telling the Washington Publish in 2021 that she and her father have been on “good terms.”
She solely talked about him a handful of instances in her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold,” whereas noting to the DNC viewers that “it was mostly my mother who raised us.”
“My father remained a part of our lives,” Harris wrote in her 2019 e book. “We would see him on weekends and spend summers with him in Palo Alto. But it was my mother who took charge of our upbringing. She was the one most responsible for shaping us into the women we would become.”
Donald Harris did notice in a current essay that he fought to take care of a relationship along with his daughters regardless of the divorce from their mom and subsequent custody battle.
Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Barack Obama and President Biden arrive for an occasion to mark the 2010 passage of the Reasonably priced Care Act within the East Room of the White Home on April 5, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Pictures)
“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,” he wrote in an essay for Jamaica World in 2020. “Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children or reneging on my responsibilities as their father.”
In 2019, Donald Harris supplied a uncommon response to his daughter in February 2019, after Kamala Harris mentioned smoking marijuana when she was youthful.
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“Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?” Kamala Harris quipped in 2019 when requested about earlier marijuana use.
Her father took situation with the remark, writing in an essay for a Jamaican media outlet that his mother and father can be “turning in their grave” over the remark.
Vice President Kamala Harris takes the stage on the Democratic Nationwide Conference on the United Middle in Chicago, Aug. 22, 2024. (Reuters/Brendan Mcdermid)
“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,” he wrote.
“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty,” he added.
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The 86-year-old father of the Democratic nominee has since remained publicly silent about his daughter, which follows consistent with his remark to Politico after reprimanding the VP for her joke about smoking marijuana.
“I have decided to stay out of all the political hullabaloo by not engaging in any interviews with the media,” he wrote to Politico on the time.
Fox Information Digital reached out to Donald Harris for remark however had not obtained a response on the time of publication.
