Kamala Harris’s Marxist father, living 1 mile from White House, never visited her
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s relationship with her 86-year-old father, Donald J Harris, is strained, with no record of him visiting her at the White House or attending her public events. Despite living less than a mile from the White House, they seem to be worlds apart.
The US Vice President doesn’t live in the White House but has a office there. The Vice President’s Office is in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, located next to the West Wing on the White House premises.
Donald J Harris, a retired Stanford professor with Marxist leanings, has kept his distance from Kamala, criticising her comments in the past and describing the political world around her as “hullabaloo”.
In her speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), Kamala Harris described their relationship as “not close”, and her father’s absence at the event was notable.
Kamala mentioned her father’s encouragement to be “fearless” but added, “It was mostly my mother who raised us”.
Kamala, who had her “big, blended family” in the audience at the DNC — including her stepchildren, husband Douglas Emhoff, and even Doug’s ex-wife — noticed that her father, Donald J Harris, was absent from the crowd.
Kamala, the Democratic presidential candidate, is an Indian-American politician whose mother is Indian and father is Jamaican.
A small village in Thulasenthirapuram in Tamil Nadu is known as the ancestral home of US Vice-President Kamala Harris’s maternal grandparents.
KAMALA’S BIG SPEECH AT DNC
Kamala’s father turned 86 just the day after she gave the biggest speech of her life at the DNC.
The event, held from August 19 to August 22, was where Kamala secured the Democratic Party’s nomination for the country’s top seat against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The US presidential polls are set for November 5.
In Kamala Harris’s South Asian identity, her mother Shyamala Gopalan is always present. The night of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) was no different. Harris recalled her mother’s journey from India to the US at 19.
KAMALA HARRIS’S FATHER STAYED BACK IN ILLINOIS
Donald J Harris was born in 1938 in Browns Town, Jamaica, in Saint Ann parish, also known as the birthplace of Bob Marley, the Jamaican singer and guitarist.
He later studied in London and earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1962, while at Berkeley, he met Shyamala Gopalan, a 19-year-old cancer researcher from India.
They married in 1963 and welcomed their daughter Kamala in 1964 while living in Oakland. Their second daughter, Maya, was born three years later.
The rupture between Kamala and her father dates back to her childhood when her parents divorced.
He remained in Illinois while Kamala and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, moved to California.
According to Kamala’s 2019 memoir, her parents “stopped being kind to each other” when Kamala was just five, and they split around that time.
Kamala’s parents officially divorced when she was seven.
In 2009, Kamala faced a personal loss when her mother, to whom she was very close, passed away from colon cancer at the age of 70.
Even though Donald became her only surviving parent, there is no record of him attending Kamala’s vice-presidential oath at Joe Biden’s 2020 inauguration, according to the Daily Mail.
Will Kamala Harris’s father attend her Presidential oath if she wins against Republican Donald Trump? Many are waiting to find out.
