Get to Know Kamala Harris's Parents, Who Influenced Her Own Political Career

From Harper's BAZAAR

Throughout the 2020 election season, California senator (and now Vice President-elect) Kamala Harris often invoked her biracial background and immigrant parents as part of her bid for the White House.

"To the woman most responsible for my presence here today, my mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who is always in our hearts," Kamala said of her late mother during her victory speech. "When she came here from India at the age of 19, she maybe didn't quite imagine this moment, but she believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible."

Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris (from India and Jamaica, respectively) immigrated to the United States to pursue doctorate degrees at the University of California at Berkeley. It's there that they met and engaged with radical political thinkers—a huge departure from the career of their daughter. The two eventually separated in 1971.

Read on to learn more about the vice president-elect's parents and their lives.

They met as students.

The UC Berkeley campus was a hotbed for radical politics and student activism, helping to form the undercurrent of the '60s civil rights movement. It was in this environment that Shyamala and Donald first met.

Donald, then a student pursuing his doctorate degree in economics, recalled speaking at an off-campus space to a group of students about the parallels between the United States and his home country of British-colonized Jamaica, in which a small number of whites had propped up a "native Black elite" to mask social and economic inequality, he told The New York Times.

Afterward, Shyamala, then pursuing a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology, approached Donald with questions: Her view of India's own British colonial system was more sheltered, having been raised by a senior civil servant, but she wanted to hear more. "This was all very interesting to me, and, I daresay, a bit charming," Donald told the Times. "At a subsequent meeting, we talked again, and at the one after that. The rest is now history." He also recalled her attendance at the student meeting as "a standout in appearance relative to everybody else in the group of both men and women."

Donald recalled his desire to attend UC Berkeley after receiving a prestigious scholarship from the British colonial government as untraditional, since most scholarship recipients at the time went on to study in Britain, rather than the United States. "From a distance and perhaps naïvely,” he told the Times, the United States seemed a "lively and evolving dynamic of a racially and ethnically complex society." Then, after reading a news story about student activists heading to the South to campaign for civil rights, he was hooked. "Further investigation of information about this University convinced me I had to go there," he said.

Meanwhile, Shyamala had dreams of becoming a biochemist that were undercut by Lady Irwin College, a British-founded school that allowed her (and other Indian women) to get only a degree in home science. Her brother, Gopalan Balachandran, told the Times, "My father and I used to tease her like nobody's business. We would say, 'What do you study in home science? Do they teach you to set up plates for dinner?' She used to get angry and laugh. She would say, 'You don't know what I'm studying.'"

Later, she took matters into her own hands, applying to UC Berkeley and—to her family's astonishment—getting accepted. "[Our father] was only worried: None of us had been abroad," her brother recalled. "He said, 'I don't know anybody in the States. I certainly don't know anybody in Berkeley.' She said, 'Father, don't worry.'"

Both Shyamala and Donald were steeped in the radical political culture on campus.

The Times reported that Shyamala met Cedric Robinson, a young Black man from Oakland, while waiting in line to register for classes in 1959. The two went on to become lifelong friends, with Robinson (who became a political activist during his student days) going on to write five books and earn tenure in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His most well-known book, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, lists Shyamala as one of his friends who helped formulate the ideas in it.

The two would together join the Afro American Association, which the Times noted as "the most foundational institution in the Black Power movement," as written by Donna Murch in her book Living for the City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party. (For instance, Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the future Black Panther Party, was a member.)

While the group limited its membership to those only of African descent, some recalled to the Times that Shyamala's status as a former subject of British colonial rule and her being a person of color welcomed her into the association. "She was part of the real brotherhood and sisterhood. There was never an issue," former member Aubrey LaBrie told the newspaper. "She was just accepted as part of the group." Later, when Shyamala and Donald separated, the Afro American Association would prove integral in helping her raise her daughters.

Donald, too, joined the Afro American Association, describing it to the Times as his introduction "to the realities of African-American life in its truest and rawest form, its richness and complexity, wealth and poverty, hope and despair."

Friends and acquaintances of the time recalled the couple's deeply political and, at times, argumentative nature. "You could tell she was 'for the people,' quote unquote, even though she had an aura of royalty about her," said Anne Williams of Shyamala. "Here was a woman, deeply brown, and yet she could have flowed from one set to another in terms of race."

Meanwhile, Baron Meghnad Desai, an economist born in India, recalled meeting the couple before a dinner party to the Times. She was "fiery and radical but not Marxist in any sense," while Donald "did take a serious interest in radical political economy, but he was a calm and patient arguer."

Shyamala never planned on staying in the United States.

In 2003, during Kamala's bid for district attorney of San Francisco, Shyamala told SF Weekly, "I came to study at UC Berkeley. I never came to stay. It's the old story: I fell in love with a guy, we got married, pretty soon kids came."

Their marriage ended in 1972.

After having two children together, Kamala and Maya Harris, Shyamala filed for divorce in 1972, per the Times, following relationship complications after Donald took a tenured teaching position at the University of Wisconsin. Instead, Shyamala raised her daughters in California.

In Kamala's 2018 memoir, The Truths We Hold, she wrote, "I knew they loved each other very much, but it seemed like they had become like oil and water," adding that "had they been a little older, a little more emotionally mature, maybe the marriage could have survived. But they were so young. My father was my mother's first boyfriend."

Donald later expressed his frustration with the custody agreements over their children, writing in an essay for Jamaica Global Online that his interactions with his children "came to an abrupt halt in 1972" and that he lost a "hard-fought custody battle in the family court of Oakland, California." Still, he wrote, "I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children or reneging on my responsibilities as their father."

In the same essay, he affectionately recalled taking both Kamala and Maya with him on a trip back to his home country of Jamaica.

Shyamala became a prominent breast cancer researcher before her death.

Shyamala's obituary proclaimed her as "a world-renowned scientist, a mentor, an activist, a mother" with "a career as a brilliant breast cancer researcher." Her work additionally took her to top research institutions like the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Department of Medicine at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, as well as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She also had 16-year tenure at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at the Jewish General Hospital and the Department of Medicine at McGill University in Montreal.

"One of her greatest contributions was her seminal work in isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene in a mouse-a momentous finding that transformed our understanding of the hormone-responsiveness of breast tissue," her obituary read. "Her discovery sparked a plethora of advancements regarding the role of progesterone and its cellular receptor in breast biology and cancer."

In 2009, she died at 70 after a struggle with cancer.

Donald became a respected professor at Stanford University.

After leaving the University of Wisconsin, Donald joined Stanford as a professor of economics emeritus, where "he was a leader in developing the new program in Alternative Approaches to Economic Analysis as a field of graduate study," according to his university profile. Much of his work also revolves around "the process of capital accumulation and its implications for a theory of growth of the economy" in order to explain "the intrinsic character of growth as a process of uneven development," a concept in the Marxian school of economics.

At Stanford, Donald gained popularity with students, gaining criticism as "too charismatic" and a "Marxist scholar," or "a pied piper leading students astray from neo-classical economics," according to a 1976 story in The Stanford Daily.

He eventually retired in 1998 to develop "public policies to promote economic growth and advance social equity."

Having returned home, he now serves as an economic consultant and adviser to Jamaica's government and various prime ministers.

Kamala hasn't mentioned her father much on the campaign trail, and he once criticized her for making a joke about her Jamaican heritage and smoking pot.

Though Kamala doesn't hesitate to praise her mother, there has been little mention of her father.

"He was not around after the divorce," Meena Harris, Kamala's niece, said to The New Yorker. "Their experience and relationship with blackness is through being raised in these communities in Berkeley and Oakland, and not through the lens of being Caribbean."

Tension brewed in early 2019, when Kamala was still a contender in the Democratic presidential primary. When asked if she had ever smoked pot during an interview with The Breakfast Club, Kamala said, "Half my family's from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?"

The joke fell flat with many—including her father. In a statement he sent to Jamaica Global Online, Donald wrote, "My dear departed grandmothers (whose extraordinary legacy I described in a recent essay on this website), 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."

Kamala's campaign has not commented on the incident.

Since then, he has mostly stayed quiet on Kamala's Democratic nomination and subsequent electoral victory, and he'll probably also stay out of the political limelight as his daughter ascends to the White House. "I have decided to stay out of all the political hullabaloo by not engaging in any interviews with the media," he wrote in an email last year reviewed by Politico.

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