Getting to Know Kamala Harris' Father, a Renowned Stanford Professor
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
Vice President Kamala Harris has spoken openly and frequently about her heritage. As the first woman, black person, and person of Asian descent to become the vice president of the United States, Harris has made a point to be open about her background and upbringing, which includes sharing information about her immediate family.
In her 2019 memoir The Truths We Hold, Harris spoke candidly about how vulnerable it is for her to share her history with the American people.
"I want you to know how personal this is for me," she wrote. "This is the story of my family. It is the story of my childhood. It is the story of the life I have built since then. You’ll meet my family and my friends, my colleagues and my team. I hope you will cherish them as I do and, through my telling, see that nothing I have ever accomplished could have been done on my own."
Now that President Joe Biden has dropped out of the 2024 election, Harris is the Democratic nominee in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. Voters are quickly becoming more familiar with the trailblazing former attorney general, senator, and current vice president of the United States—and the family that means so much to her.
As the daughter of two immigrants, Harris has spoken openly about how her upbringing has affected her perspective of the world, her personal life (including her oft-mispronounced name, which means "lotus" in Sanskrit), and her stance on many political issues.
“My father, like so many Jamaicans, has immense pride in our Jamaican heritage and instilled that same pride in my sister and me,” Harris wrote in a 2021 email to the Washington Post. “We love Jamaica. He taught us the history of where we’re from, the struggles and beauty of the Jamaican people, and the richness of the culture.”
Her father also taught her to be fearless. "My father would say...'Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you,'" she told a huge crowd at the Democratic National Convention, where she officially accepted the party's nomination.
According to the 2021 Post article, Harris and her father Donald Harris, a former economics professor at Stanford, are on "good terms." Still, some of her previous comments also suggest that she was much closer to her late mother.
Here's what we know about her father and their relationship.
He was born in Jamaica.
According to his Stanford bio, Donald is a naturalized U.S. citizen (which unfortunately sparked bogus, and racist, claims that Kamala isn't eligible to run for office). Donald attended the University of California Berkeley and worked at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) before moving to California.
During his time at Stanford, Donald acted as an economic consultant to the Jamaican government and advisor to various prime ministers there. Renee Anne Shirley, former advisor to the Jamaican prime minister, said, "In three years, he got tenure—think about it, a Black man—and then he left and went to go to Stanford? He is a big thing for us...He pushed the boundaries. He was way ahead of his time."
He was a prominent professor at Stanford.
According to his bio, Donald joined the faculty at Stanford in 1972. His focus has been "exploring the analytical conception of the process of capital accumulation and its implications for a theory of growth of the economy, with the aim of providing thereby an explanation of the intrinsic character of growth as a process of uneven development."
According to The Oprah Magazine, he taught undergraduate classes such as "Theory of Capitalist Development" and graduate students in a program named, "Alternative Approaches to Economic Analysis." He was deemed a "Marxist" scholar by The Stanford Daily, indicating that "there was some opposition to granting him tenure because he was 'too charismatic, a pied piper leading students astray from neo-Classical economics.'" Nevertheless, he was the first Black person to receive tenure in Stanford’s economics department, and people who knew him have said they can see his tenacity and spirited argumentation in his daughter's political debates.
He retired in 1998, and to this day holds the title of emeritus professor. Currently, he works on "developing public policies to promote economic growth and advance social equity."
He and Kamala's mother divorced in the '70s.
Donald immigrated to the U.S. to attend Berkeley, where he met Kamala's mother, Shyamala Gopalan.
The pair crossed paths when Gopalan met Donald at one of his off-campus meetings in 1962 that discussed the parallels between Jamaica and the U.S. After the meeting was over, Gopalan introduced herself. Donald recalled her to The New York Times as "a standout in appearance relative to everybody else in the group of both men and women."
Despite growing up on opposite sides of the world, the ideas Donald presented intrigued Gopalan. "This was all very interesting to me, and, I daresay, a bit charming," he recalled in the interview. "At a subsequent meeting, we talked again, and at the one after that. The rest is now history."
Funny enough, Gopalan didn't plan on staying past her college years. "I came to study at UC Berkeley," she said to SF Weekly. "I never came to stay. It's the old story: I fell in love with a guy, we got married, pretty soon kids came."
The pair were married in 1963. One year later, in 1964, Kama was born. Two years later, her sister, Maya, joined the fold.
According to Harris' autobiography, The Truths We Hold, their marriage and decision to stay in the U.S. "were the ultimate acts of self-determination and love." Her first exposure to protests and demonstrations was apparently a "stroller’s-eye view."
Eventually, however, the marriage soured, and the pair separated when Kamala was 5 years old. Two years later, when Kamala was 7, her parents officially divorced.
“In time, things got harder. They stopped being kind to each other. I knew they loved each other very much, but it seemed they’d become like oil and water,” Harris recounted in her memoir.
In a 2018 essay written by Donald, he also discussed the divorce, saying it "came to an abrupt halt in 1972" after losing a "hard-fought custody battle in the family court of Oakland, California." He explained that despite the divorce, his love for his family never faltered. "Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children or reneging on my responsibilities as their father."
Gopalan's brother told The New York Times: "She was quite unhappy about the separation but she had already got used to that and she didn't want to talk to Don after that. When you love somebody, then love turns into very hard bitterness, you don't even want to talk to them."
He was critical of one of Kamala's jokes during her 2020 presidential campaign.
At one point while Kamala was touring the country as part of her 2020 presidential campaign, the then-senator was asked whether she smoked pot when she was young.
"Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?" she replied, a tongue-in-cheek response to an arguably outdated question, as nearly half the country has legalized marijuana for recreational use and, according to 2022 data from the Pew Research Center, 88% of Americans believe weed should be legal for both medical and recreational use.
Harris' father was apparently upset by his daughter's response, and sent a comment to a Jamaican publication.
"Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty," he added.
Kamala's then-campaign had no comment. When emailed by Politico for further comment, Donald said: "I have decided to stay out of all the political hullabaloo by not engaging in any interviews with the media." The post has since been deleted.
Kamala speaks most often about her mom and sister.
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.
