Vice President Kamala Harris has frequently cited her upbringing and family as she crisscrosses the nation in an effort to rally support for her newly-formed presidential campaign, including touting her father in a rare mention at 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 said during her acceptance speech during the DNC in Chicago last 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’ parents divorced when she was 7 years old, with the future vice president spending a lot of her time with her mother and sister in Canada in her youth, where their mother worked as a researcher at the McGill University School of Medicine.
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Donald Harris holding his daughter Kamala in April 1965. (Kamala Harris campaign, via Associated Press)
Following Harris rising to the top of the Democratic presidential ticket and formally accepting the party’s nomination last week, Fox News Digital examined her father’s background and legacy within academia.
Donald J. Harris, who coincidentally shares the same first name as VP Harris’ Republican rival, former President Donald J. Trump, is a retired Stanford University professor of economics, whose econ background is steeped in Marxist theory, which earned him the description from the Economist last 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 degree from the University of London before moving to the U.S. to complete his doctorate in economics at the University of California in Berkeley in 1966. He met the vice president’s mother while attending Berkeley, with the pair marrying and sharing daughters Kamala and Maya Harris.
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He held teaching positions at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign before the couple divorced in the early 1970s. He took a position with Stanford in 1972 as a professor of economics after also working at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
The Stanford Daily, the elite university’s student newspaper, described Donald Harris as teaching “radical political economics” and as a “Marxian economist” in 1974. He notably became the first Black scholar to receive tenure within Stanford’s economic school.
Kamala Harris has also rarely mentioned her father throughout her political career. (Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images)
He retired from teaching 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,” according to his Stanford biography. He has since served as an expert on how to inspire economic growth for his home country of Jamaica, the Washington Post previously reported.
Harris also still serves as a professor emeritus at Stanford following his retirement.
He has notably remained relatively quiet about his daughter’s political successes, not joining her at the DNC or other political rallies and very rarely offering insight into his relationship with his daughter.
Kamala Harris has also rarely mentioned her father throughout her political career, saying in 2003, “My father is a good guy, but we are not close,” before telling the Washington Post in 2021 that she and her father were on “good terms.”
She only mentioned him a handful of times in her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold,” while noting to the DNC audience that “it was mostly my mother who raised us.”
My father remained a part of our lives,” Harris wrote in her 2019 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.”
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Donald Harris did note in a recent essay that he fought to maintain a relationship with his daughters despite the divorce from their mother and subsequent custody battle.
Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Barack Obama and President Biden arrive for an event to mark the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act in the East Room of the White House on April 5, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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 Global 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 offered a rare response to his daughter in February 2019, after Kamala Harris discussed smoking marijuana when she was younger.
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“Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?” Kamala Harris quipped in 2019 when asked about previous marijuana use.
Her father took issue with the comment, writing in an essay for a Jamaican media outlet that his parents would be “turning in their grave” over the comment.
Vice President Kamala Harris takes the stage at the Democratic National Convention at the United Center 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 in line with his comment 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 at the time.
Fox News Digital reached out to Donald Harris for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.
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